Karin Jones at Wil Aballe, Vancouver

Blind Spots brings together recent works by Karin Jones, which examine the politics of adornment and beauty within contemporary material culture. Jones’ interdisciplinary practice emerges from a background in jewellery and metalsmithing, where she consistently mobilizes craft traditions as conceptual tools for societal critique. For example, she highlights how materials such as human hair, operate as carriers of cultural value, racialized histories, and social expectation. Her work occupies a productive tension between ornament and excess, seduction and unease, troubling colonial conventions of material language.

Extending Jones’  long-standing engagement with bodily scale and crafted form, her sculptural works hover between jewellery, sculpture, and relic—objects which emphasize tactility, while resisting a fixed categorization. Here, Jones foregrounds how adornment functions not only as decoration but as a site where identity is negotiated and disciplined.

Central to the presentation are works from The Golden Section series, composed of commercially sourced blonde hair extensions knotted onto vinyl mesh. Referencing ideals of proportion, the repetitive act of knotting becomes both labour and language, transforming hair into a modular, architectural surface that implicates systems of standardization and value. In, Untitled Neckpiece, Jones collapses adornment and constraint into a wearable form. Combining human hair with bronze and magnetized elements, the work evokes historical associations of ornament and bodily regulation, positioning jewellery as both intimate object and weighted cultural signifier.

Anchoring these works is the photograph Swatches 2 (More Fun), an earlier self-portrait that underscores hair’s role in performative identity and self- representation. With humour, the image stages hair as a mutable surface through which norms of femininity, race, and desirability are rehearsed and unsettled.

Together these works articulate Jones’ sustained inquiry into how materials circulate: disseminated through bodies, economies, and histories. In Blind Spots, Jones details the social weight embedded in everyday materials.

Karin Jones is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in jewellery. She received a Diploma in Jewellery Art and Design from Vancouver Community College in 1993, before embarking on a more than twenty-year career as a goldsmith and independent artisan. Since 2007, her work has moved away from traditional jewellery and into contemporary art. She completed an MFA in Jewellery at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax, Nova Scotia, followed by international apprenticeships in jewellery and blacksmithing techniques, and since 2013 has been the Department Head of Jewellery Art & Design at Vancouver Community College. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Royal Ontario Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Metal Museum (Memphis, Tennessee).