For my participation to 1-54 Contemporary African art fair in London I present my new series 'Love Learns to Breathe' with The 1897 gallery.
Find us at booth W8 !
‘Love Learns to Breathe’ explores Black love, self-love, and the complexity of intimacy—how we define ourselves in relation to one another. Within this work, love is not sentimental but radical: an act of resistance, of self-seeing, of choosing tenderness.
Jones’s work is inspired by the writings of bell hooks, who reminds us that “the choice to love is a necessary dimension of liberation.” Her call—to love ourselves so furiously, so tenderly, that we water our own flowers first—resonates throughout this series. Love here is both methodology and material: a lens for witnessing the self and others, a site of grief, transformation, and restoration.
The work reclaims the gaze as agency. To see oneself and to be seen—fully, vulnerably, and with compassion—is itself a form of power. The act of seeing becomes the act of loving.
Through this lens, Love Learns to Breathe invites viewers into a sacred dialogue on love as liberation—an invitation to give, receive, and embody love in all its contradictory forms. It asks us to pause and consider the essence of love as liberation—to reflect on what it truly means to give and receive love, to embody love.