UNEARTHING(S): Hannah Catherine Jones at Leeds Art Gallery
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UNEARTHING(S): Hannah Catherine Jones
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An other-worldly installation is currently on display in the chapel-like setting of Leeds Art Gallery’s Central Court, courtesy of Hannah Catherine Jones. UNEARTHING(S) is the Doncaster-born artist’s largest exhibition to date, and the first she has made in Yorkshire, the county where she was born.
Jones is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and installation artist whose work is built around decolonisation – disrupting the status quo, re-centring marginalised voices, making space for collective healing. Her ongoing project The Oweds treats sound as a form of repair, using voice, sample and ritual to reconnect with ancestry. She’s also the founder of the Peckham Chamber Orchestra and the Chiron Choir – the latter “open to diasporic women, femmes and non-binary musicians and non-musicians of all vocal abilities”.
UNEARTHING(S) is more personal. Drawing on her own family history and her upbringing within Yorkshire’s Caribbean diaspora, the exhibition sits with cultural and ancestral roots – with lives lived and lost. UNEARTHING(S) references and samples Yorkshire and Bajan culture, filtered through her own artistic style, with poignancy, spirituality and subversion running through it.
Central Court’s arched, glazed roof already gives the room something of a chapel about it, and UNEARTHING(S) leans into that, using sculpture, light and sound to push the space toward contemplation. It opens alongside a new display of Jean Arp’s plaster sculptures and Garth Evans’s Anti-Virus works, both entering the gallery’s permanent collection this summer. Jones’s contribution won’t join them; its currency is its temporaneity, built specifically for this room and this run of dates, then gone.
The exhibition falls within Leeds 400, a year-long celebration marking 400 years since Leeds was granted its charter in 1626. Jones’s version of that anniversary works differently: not civic commemoration but lived experience – one artist drawing on family, community and inherited loss across Bajan and Yorkshire lines.
