My research is focused on sculpture in 19th century France and Britain; sculpture and the decorative arts; and sculpture and childhood.
I am currently working towards my next book, Sculpture and Contemporary Life in Britain, 1837-1901, under contract with Manchester University Press. In recent decades, the scholarship on sculpture in nineteenth-century Britain has been dominated by the New Sculpture of the 1870s onwards, and by a tendency to position British sculpture within a trajectory towards twentieth-century modernism. In contrast, my study considers the breadth of sculptural experimentation throughout Victoria’s reign, with a specific focus on how sculptors attempted to respond to contemporary concerns through sculpture. It examines five key areas of sculptural activity and debate: the first sculptor societies and their promotion of British sculpture; the contentious form of the portrait statue and of modern clothing in sculpture; the influence of Christianity on both secular and church sculpture; sentimentality and the everyday; and a reassessment of the New Sculpture as a reactionary rather than avant-garde departure from the sculpture that preceded it.
Publications related to this project include:
‘“A Perverted Taste”: Italian depictions of Cloth and Puberty in mid-19th-century century Marble’, in Alice Kettle and Leslie Millar (eds), The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (Bloomsbury Academic, February 2018)
‘Nathaniel Hitch and the Making of Church Sculpture’, in a Special Issue on 'Victorian Sculpture', 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 22 (2016)
‘A Creative Engagement with Historic and Modern Sculpture: Waldo Story's Fallen Angel’, Sculpture Journal, 23:2 (2014), pp. 145-158.
Entries on Gothic, Christian and decorative sculpture in Martina Droth, Jason Edwards and Michael Hatt (eds), Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837-1901 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), cat. 45-46, 48-51, 144.
Sculpture and the Decorative.
I am also interested in intersections across the arts, and different makers, and my research also focuses on sculpture and the decorative. My monograph on sculptors and design reform in France, 1848 to 1895, developed from my PhD dissertation. Challenging distinctions between fine and decorative art, its central argument is that we need to include the decorative in the study of sculpture, in order to present a more accurate and comprehensive account of the practice and profession of sculpture in this period. I am developing this research area further, through a cross-disciplinary collaboration on sculpture and the decorative with Dr Imogen Hart (University of California, Berkeley).
Publications related to this project include:
Sculptors and Design Reform in France, 1848 to 1895: Sculpture and the Decorative Arts (Ashgate, 2014)
Co-edited with Imogen Hart, Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe, 17th Century to Contemporary (under contract with Bloomsbury Academic)
Sculpture and Childhood.
I am currently developing a project on sculpture and childhood, which develops on from some minor sections in my PhD thesis, and my recent research on sculpture in 19th century Britain. I am interested in how love, sentimentality and class are represented in 19th century sculptural depictions of children, and also in the problematic areas of sexualisation and the erotic in some of these works.
Publications related to this project:
“A Perverted Taste”: Italian depictions of Cloth and Puberty in mid-19th-century century Marble’, in Alice Kettle and Leslie Millar (eds), The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (Bloomsbury Academic, February 2018), pp. 36-47.
‘Realism and the Multiple: Pietro Magni’s Reading Girl (c.1861)’, Midland Art Papers, Issue 1, 2017.
Dr Claire Jones