17/12/2004-31/01/2005.

Closing event Friday 28 January 2005 6.30-9pm. Viewed from the street: 24 hours.

Restoration is a homage to the artists own childhood; one spent in awe of the imposing houses and grand historicism of his local area, Greenwich, and submerged in imaginary worlds of palaces and princesses, to transport him from the domestic reality of his own life. The physical act of handling materials, making, pinning, sewing or drawing, is the artist’s conscious attempt to draw himself back into those worlds – worlds whose innocence is now tainted by experience; a paradise forever lost.

South-East London based artist, Sam Jones, scours local ‘Pound Shops’ and markets for cheap, garish and domestic materials to transform into his meticulous and highly decorative art-work – visual spectacles of surprising beauty.

While blurring boundaries of the diurnal and the decadent in his use of media, Sam also seeks to bring together opposing notions of adult and child, memory and reality, public and private. The artist makes no plans or measurements, and his sculptures evolve organically; reminiscent of the complex Lego structures and the flamboyant dressing-up costumes he would make as a young boy.

Sam’s art can be read as nightmarish, grotesquely grandiose, darkly subversive, and dense with allusion. Refreshingly, it also revels in its own sense of humour. It is these contradictions which make the work so compelling. Lotte Jeffs

Since leaving Central St Martins College of Art in 2004 Sam Jones has been selected for Future Map Visual Arts 04 at The Gallery, Davies Street, London and has undertaken a Public art commission for ‘Covent Garden Month’, September 2004, at The Piazza, Covent Garden. London.