Dr Claire Jones
Post-doctoral Researcher
Profile
Biography
BA (Essex), MA (RCA/V&A), PhD (York)
Claire Jones is the Post Doctoral Research Fellow on the AHRC-funded project Displaying Victorian Sculpture, working on a reader of textual and visual sources on Victorian sculpture. She has recently completed her PhD at the University of York, which considers the involvement of sculptors including Rodin and Carrier-Belleuse in design reform in France, 1848-1895. Her study reveals ways in which 'decorative' sculpture has been subsequently defined and marginalised in relation to a Modernist understanding of Rodin and of Modern sculpture more broadly, examining archival documentation and surviving objects to present a more comprehensive understanding of French sculpture during the period. Claire was formerly Curator of Furniture at the Bowes Museum, 2001-2007. She is interested in all aspects of the decorative arts and sculpture during the nineteenth century, but especially in changing attitudes towards manufacture and the handmade, collaborative and autonomous works, historicism, and surface effect.
Publications- 'La Formation d'un Sculpteur' in F. Blanchetière and W. Saade eds. Rodin, les Arts décoratifs, exh. cat. (Évian, Palais Lumière, 2009; Paris, Musée Rodin, 2010), 10-15.
- 'A Neo-Classical Discovery at the Bowes Museum', Apollo (May 2005), 64-67.
- Co-author and co-editor, H. Coutts and C. Jones Toulouse-Lautrec and the Art of the French Poster, exh. cat. (Bowes Museum, 2004).
- 'Plaster as a Historic Resource and a Creative Medium in 19th Century French Decorative Arts', Plaster and Plaster Casts, Materiality and Practice, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2010.
- 'Rationality and Creativity: Ornament and the Figurative in the Sculptural Imagination of Nineteenth-Century French Furniture', Metamorphosis and the Migration of Forms, Henry Moore Institute, 2008.
- 'Body and Object: The Body in Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Art', Bodies of Evidence, AAH, Oxford Brookes University, 2008.
