Articles:

• Tacoma News Tribune blog, August 2010
• Worldgolf.com blog, August 2010
• Exhibition review by Mocoloco, February 2009
• "Flux" by TJ Norris, ARTnews Magazine, September 2008
• "Reviews" by Erica H Adams, Glass Quarterly, no.109
• "Through the Looking Glass", Surface & Symbol, Stephanie Dickinson, Feb/March 2007
• Contemporary Canadian Glass, Winter 2005
• "Event Profile" Toronto Life, Betty-Ann Jordan, February 2005 issue
• "Appealing Aquatics", Now Magazine, Catherine Farquharson, Feb 24-Mar 2, 2005
• Toronto .com
• "Land & Sea:Paintings by Clifford Smith;Glassworks & Photographs by Taliaferro Jones"
Art New England, August/September, 2004
• "Taliaferro Jones" Member Profile, Glass Art Society Newsletter, 2004
• "Taliaferro Jones, Colour a Transparent Voice" , Arte, Joanne Vanin, 2004
• "Jones has designs on Ryder Cup", Globe and Mail, Lorne Rubenstein, 6/6/2001
• "Storming Talent ", This Side Up!, Cindy Mueller, 6/1999

Television press:

• TVO - television special feature:
• BRAVO - television special feature:

Television press:

• TVO - television special feature:
Thursday, March 3rd at 8:00 PM.

• BRAVO - television special feature:
Saturday, March 5th at 6:00 PM
Sunday, March 6th at 7:00 PM
CITY TV will also run this segment as will CKVU (City) in Vancouver

Click here to download a Bravo clip

Article:

• Tacoma News Tribune Blog, August 2010

• WorldGolf.com blog, August 2010

Article:

•Exhibition review by Mocoloco, February 2009

http://mocoloco.com/art/archives/010531.php

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Article:

• "Flux" by TJ Norris, ARTnews Magazine, September 2008

printable version

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Article:

• "Reviews" by Erica H.Adams, Glass Quarterly, no. 109

printable version

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Article:

• Surface & Symbol, February/March 2007

Through the Looking Glass
by Stephanie Dickinson,

Glass sculpture. Now before you go ahead and think, “Eh,” think again. Glass sculpture. Not glass blowing, but molding glass into shapes.

Aha! Now you see. It’s right up there with Stephen Hawking, Mexican hot chocolate and flattened chicken – mind-blowing.

Taliaferro Jones is a glass sculpturist. It is not only an art, but a rare one. She is a master of her art, and one of only 25 international artists to be a juried participant in the First International Bienale of Glass Sculpture, taking place in Madrid, Spain. And upon meeting Jones in her expansive bright, white studio in Parkdale, I can see why, after she takes me through her process step-by-step.

“First I begin with a clay model.”

When she comes up with a shape she likes, she then sculpts it in clay or wax.

“Then I make a rubber mould and than a master mould out of plaster.”

It sounds simple enough, but her large pieces introduce the problem of weight and size and cost of materials.

“Nobody in Canada casts on this scale.”

“It takes me a long time to get through a series.”

Jones explains that “Wax has a memory,” and it is here that I begin to understand what a long process it is. She shows me her large pieces that look like waves removed from the ocean and frozen in time.

“Sculpting them in clay took several months. They aren’t done by machine,” she says. “I want them to be as organic as possible.”
Then there’s the whole kiln process. It is the width of my bed and it is much taller than either of us. She gets on her tip toes and opens the top far above her head for me to see how deep it is. It seems practically bottomless, like if I dropped a penny, it would be awhile before we heard it.

“What we’re doing is essentially light industrial but in a studio space,” she says. That’s for sure.

Taliaferro Jones at work with wax and glass in her studio. Photo: Stephanie Dickison.

Jones explains that the larger pieces “take a month to come down to temperature” and that you have to wait so that they don't break. She is the only artist in Canada to cast pieces this large and while the pieces are impressive, being walked through the long and difficult process gives you a whole new appreciation for her stunning work.

Jones grew up in Northern California and moved to Toronto in 1999. Ever since, has been bringing us the magic and power of the water through her work. Whether it is being a California girl or visiting Kaua’i, the oldest and fourth largest of the main Hawaiian Islands, water is a part of Jones.

“My art is somewhat influenced by Kaua’i. It completely fills the work and it’s also where my family gathers.”

Jones developed her craft at Tufts University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Sheridan College.

Her work illustrates the connection between our bodies and bodies of water and studying her sensual, hypnotic kiln-cast glass work, you become an extension of the pieces and they you.
Jones explains that she tries “to feel the sentiment of the piece.” Much of her current work is curved and seems to be filling in a space.

“I’m interested in a hollow form,” she says.

Jones teaches me about the different hues that you can create using one colour and with the bright sunshine shooting through her studio window, the transparency of the glass varies too – some have that bottle-washed-up-on-the-shore cloudiness and some are clear with bubbles and on one, there are delicate indentations on the inside of the curved form, like a vessel of the ocean has washed up onto our laps. Her sculptures have titles like “Undulation,” “Surfacing,” “Shore,” and “Cascade” and it is as if she has created hydrotherapy through glass.

Glass becomes exciting to me for the very first time and I can’t stop thinking about it and how powerful it is.

Jones says, “It’s a complete anomaly. It’s heavy and translucent.” But she takes me back over to the bottle-green piece with silver at its top, like a crested wave.

“You’re sculpting with light,”she says.

She shows me “how the light follows from top to bottom” and I am shocked to learn I’ve got goosebumps. I feel like I’ve just seen the Eighth Wonder of the World.

She tells me that “My work right now is really water-based, but it hasn’t always been.” It doesn’t matter. Jones has clearly found something that compels both her and the audience.

And not only does she capture water’s beauty through glass, but through her compelling landscape photography. Showcasing brilliant Cote d’Azur and artificial raspberry blues, the shadows of the waves and how the light hits the soft lapping waves, her photos of bodies of water transcend the page and transform you.
Explaining her photography work, she says, “It’s just a whole different way of working.”

We look at some awesomely powerful pictures of water and it is immediately evident the play of the physical and spiritual. They are titled “Swell,” “Surge,” “Quench,” “Murmur,” and “Afterglow.” I am consumed.

“Our bodies are predominately of water,” she explains. “Light and sound moves through water. Light moves, flows. It teaches me.”
She has taught me too. We are water and water is us. And Taliaferro Jones has captured that perfectly, brilliantly.

See more of Jones’ work at her website – http://www.talieferrojones.com and at the Sandra Ainsley Gallery, Distillery District, 55 Mill Street, 416-214-9490. http://www.sandraainsleygallery.com

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Article:

• Contemporary Canadian Glass, Winter 2005.

Catching the Wave
by Richard J. Berman

The highest goodness is like water. Water benefits all things and does not compete. It stays in the lowly places which other despise. Therefore it is near the eternal.

-Tao Te Ching

The new series of large-scale works by artist Taliaferro Jones provides a welcome reminder that glass, even after it cools, is technically a liquid. Left in place for enough time - hundreds or even thousands of years - even the largest pieces of glass will eventually melt into a formless pool through a process called thixotropia. Jones, a California native who moved to Toronto in 1999, has tapped into this unique property of glass to create sensual works that look as if they could transform themselves into a wave or a stream.

"The new work is about water, perhaps as a representation of how we flow through our lives," Jones explains. "Our bodies are 90 percent water, but we still have a need to ground ourselves. In many ways we are between states, part liquid and part solid - just like glass."

Drawing on the connection between the human body and her glass sculptures, Jones points out that space and distance are just as critical as matter. "Every atom in the world is empty. All our cells have a nucleus, but they are mostly space. I've tried to capture this space 'in between' and illustrate the importance of what is inside of us - between two people in an energetic way when connecting with each other." Many of her new works reflect this philosophy by creating visually stunning spaces that are as much a part of the work as the glass itself. The viewer cannot help but be reminded of the hollow curl of a wave or the distance between ripples on a lake.

Water plays in important role in Jones' art at every turn. All of her glass sculptures start as watercolours even before she makes the first maquettes and molds, adding to the feeling that any of her works could turn into a lake on a moment's notice. Using a range of "cool" greens and blues, Jones has literally captured the feeling of water in motion. Complementing her glass work are a series of photographs - some of which are more than eight feet wide - of patterns of sand, water, grass and other natural elements that carry on a dialogue with her sculptures. In fact, many of the photos look like they could be details of her glass sculptures.

Among the highlights of Jones' new work are Unfurl and Embrace, two sea-blue glass sculptures that capture not only the many colours of water, but its sense of movement and interplay. "Embrace is what inspired all the rest of the work," the artist notes. "It really encompasses 'the space in between' and the different colors of blue shifting through each other."

Just as her work reflects the ebb and flow of the world, Jones' career has taken some unexpected turns, including the one that landed her in Canada. Raised in Northern California, she graduated from the prestigious St. Paul's School in New Hampshire and attended Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she received a BA in Art History and a BFA in photography, sculpture and glass. Following her graduation she spent several years studying and working in Latin America and Europe before moving to Toronto, where she completed two years of post-graduate work in Sheridan College's glass program.

Sitting in her downtown studio, Jones says that coming to Canada had never been on her radar. "I had never even visited Toronto when I moved here. All I knew was that Sheridan had a great program and was focused on some of the techniques that I was exploring." Today, more than five years later, she is an instructor in Exhibition Planning and Glass Marketing and Publicity at the Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning (formerly Sheridan College) - the very programme she attended as a student.

Jones exhibits internationally and has earned commissions for large-scale glass and photography, and her work has been featured in several books and publications. Since her first solo show in Boston in 1998, her work has appeared in more than 35 shows in the United States and Canada, and is also featured in several collections in Europe and North America. Later this year several of her pieces will be featured in “Northern Neighbors: Canadian Glass” in Carefree, Arizona, as well as in her own solo exhibition, “Between,” in Toronto, Canada.

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Article:

• Toronto Life, February, 2005

Art / Art
Taliaferro Jones

Taliaferro Jones has produced an astonishing body of powerfully spare cast crystal sculptures (think of the American sculptor Richard Serra’s work writ small), in colours ranging from the turquoise of tropical waters to the cobalt and jade of deep ocean. Exceptionally large for kiln-cast glass, they are also technical tours de force. When the only two glass facilities in the world that custom cast pieces of this size (up to 28 inches in height) backed out of doing her firing, 30-year-old Jones built her own immense kiln in Toronto, learning how to painstakingly anneal works that take more than a month to cool. Inspired by water (as Jones points out, glass is really a liquid), the surfaces are energized by subtly organic textures.

—Betty Ann Jordan

Address: 
Sandra Ainsley Gallery, Distillery Historic District, 55 Mill Street, Bldg. 32, 416-214-9490.
Web:  www.sandraainsleygallery.com
Event Starts: February 19, 2005
Event Ends: March 18, 2005

How Much: Free

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Article:

• Toronto.com

Event Profile

Since Taliaferro was a young girl she's always been drawn to water. She's drawn to its calming sounds, its rhythm and movement.
Her latest exhibition, Between features a collection of large scale glass sculptures and photographs.
"There is a constant interplay between the glass and photography. They have a dialogue that goes back and forth, and intermix with all the things I love to read and think about. A lot of it's my own personal philosophy and curiosity about life [and] how people interact," says Jones.
Utilizing texture, form and light, Jones explores the essence of balance from the physical to the spiritual in her glass works and giclée prints. Her sensual photographs of macro patterns of sand, water, grass and other natural elements carry on a dialogue with her minimalist glass sculptures.
As a child Jones danced, and she feels this also had a dramatic influence on her work. According to Jones, "water has a lot of movement, but dance has a lot of movement and I'm fascinated by rhythm. If you look at the body of work prior to this, which is more based on balance, this is just the next tier, an evolution of that context."
The photographs are stunning, all of which were shot in Hawaii over the last year. Prints of the original photo's are for sale and range between $600-650.

to view profile online click: http://www.toronto.com/profile/878845/

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Article:

• "Land and Sea:Paintings by Clifford Smith; Glassworks and Photographs by Taliaferro Jones Art New England, August/September, 2004

printable version

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Article:

• "Taliaferro Jones" Member Profile, Glass Art Society Newsletter, 2004

printable version

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Article:

• "Taliaferro Jones, Colour a Transparent Voice", Arte, Joanne Vanin, 2004

Article:

• "Jones has designs on Ryder Cup", Globe and Mail, Lorne Rubenstein, 6/6/2001
 
Golf course architects benefit when their works of art (well, sometimes that's what they are) host major events. Robert Trent Jones Jr., who has designed courses throughout the world, was in Toronto the other day on a stopover to visit his daughter Taliaferro, an artist herself who lives in the city, and he talked about many subjects. Foremost on his mind was the possibility that a course in Wales that he designed might be host to the 2009 Ryder Cup.

In fact, the golf world has been full of rumours that Jones's course at Celtic Manor, a resort in Wales, will host that Ryder Cup. Canadian businessman Terry Matthews, a native of Wales, owns the resort, and the Welsh government is behind the bid. The European Tour's chief executive Ken Schofield said he prefers the course as the Ryder Cup venue.

This qualified as reason for a tiff in European golf. Schofield, by his declaration, was taking on the European PGA's head man Sandy Jones, who then reminded other sites under consideration that no decision had yet been made. The European Tour and the European PGA supposedly have equal roles in determining the site, with the latter group -- Sandy Jones, that is -- having the deciding vote.

In any case, the decision will be announced in September, probably around the time of this year's Ryder Cup at the Belfry in England. Robert Jones, obviously, hopes Celtic Manor will win the competition.

"My father became friends with Terry Matthews 10 years ago," Robert Jones, 61, said over a drink in the rooftop bar at Toronto's Park Hyatt hotel. "He designed the first two courses there and I did the third, which would be the Ryder Cup site."

His father was the renowned architect of the same name. Jones Jr.'s paternal grandfather was Welsh, and married an Englishwoman who lived on the England/Wales border. They immigrated to the U.S. in 1912, when his father was six, and lived in Rochester, N.Y. He and his brother Rees absorbed the principles of course design from their father.

Matthews, meanwhile, is often described as "one of Canada's high-tech billionaires." Jones has designed a course for him called The Marshes, in Ottawa, and visited him there the day after his stopover in Toronto. Before going there he wanted to see his daughter, who lives in Toronto, where she works as an artist in glass, and as a photographer.

As Jones talked, Taliaferro -- Tolly to her dad -- listened carefully and spoke up frequently. Her thought-provoking work can be seen at the Sandra Ainsley Gallery in Toronto. She graduated last year a program in glass work at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ont.

"In any creative activity you get more and more refined," she said. "Your work tends more to the minimalist. But you can only strip something down once you've overloaded your system."
At the hotel, Jones chatted about Celtic Manor and his daughter's work. She did some pieces about grass, a subject that Jones as a course designer has to understand. One day she called him and asked for the names of various grasses.

Her father told her about fescue, a grass native to many links courses in the United Kingdom. That's what she called one of her pieces. Another is called Bluegrass.

It was getting late. I asked Jones which were his favourite courses among those his father designed. Which would he play now if he could?

"I'd play Spyglass Hill in Pebble Beach, and Mauna Kea on Hawaii's black lava fields in Kamuela on the Big Island. The routing is magnificent," Jones said. "I'd play Sotogrande in Spain, which is better than Valderrama site of the 1997 Ryder Cup. And I'd play the Dunes in Myrtle Beach."

Jones looked at his daughter and concluded, "I'm of the earth, she's of the glass." He chuckled, knowing this sounded pretentious. But what of it? Father and daughter are artists, and they challenge each other, and us, with their ideas.

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