Alan Jones, Orphaned Objects (2017)

In Orphaned Objects, Alan Jones depicts packaging materials that once encased consumer items during shipment. These non-local objects, usually discarded, are made to mould around their luxury cargo. Jones photographs these “blown objects” on out-of-date analogue materials, technologies of a redundant photographic industry that are themselves remainders from an earlier age of commodity culture. These materials have an inherent patina that imbues these unwanted objects with a sense of memory and time passing, their carefully designed contours become sculpturally beautiful, yet melancholic. These polystyrene structures have travelled the world on shipping containers, and they often end up floating in those oceans along with other plastic wastage, potentially outliving us all.

Alan Jones is a Manchester based artist who uses a broad range of photographic practises, with specific interest in the use of redundant technologies, analogue and contact processes. Jones’ work exposes the relationships between materials, space and time and seeks to find meaning in the patina of social structures. His work featured in the first two Paper Geographies exhibitions at Manchester Central Library (2020) and the Arles Photography Festival, France (2022). He has also exhibited in Plant Noma, Manchester (2018), AIR Gallery, Cheshire (2018) and Federation House, Manchester (2017). In 2015 he curated the exhibition Still Moving for the Vertical Gallery, Manchester School of Art. As a commercial photographer he has worked with image libraries, book publishers and record companies. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Photography at Manchester Metropolitan University.