Inspired by Archives of Pain, a song from the album The Holy Bible by the Manic Street Preachers, Jones produces a digital drawing focusing on images of killers with their families.
(above) Russell Jones, Archives of Pain, 2022, Digital Drawing
Transitioning his practice from physical mediums to digital alternatives, Jones produces high-quality drawings using Procreate. In his recent body of work, Jones systematically works through The Holy Bible by The Manic Street Preachers as a prompt to produce artwork, compounding his emotional response to the music in combination with his own interests and research to produce visualisations and metaphors inspired by each song.
The Sheffield-based artist was deeply inspired during his teenage years by The Manic Street Preachers, and he acknowledges the project as an excellent way to revisit fond memories and, to some extent, reevaluate the content of each recording.
The way society perceives criminals often depicts them in a way that dehumanises them as the individuals they are. While there is no willingness to condemn their reason for conviction, Archives of Pain allows the audience to perceive the offender in a way that removes this context and highlights that prior to breaking the law or causing harm to others, every criminal is an individual who is often cared for and highly regarded by those in their intimate circle.
"For me, I was interested in the juxtaposition of nice, normal family photos and the evil unknown lurking within."
Even with the title of the work included in the drawing, Archives of Pain does not necessarily imply that those in the image are criminals who have committed acts of evil, and instead urges them to consider what all the images have in common, and why the title is relevant. As a result, the Archives of Pain is a testament to our access to free will. What seemingly normal, friendly, and harmless individuals can be capable of, and that the gap between us and them as portrayed in media isn’t as vast as we are led to believe.
Archives of Pain, in combination with his wider body of work, was displayed in the EQUINOX Final Year Fine Art Exhibition at Sheffield Hallam University. As a recent graduate, Jones intends on continuing and developing his music-driven practice in combination with other creative endeavours.
Website: russelljonesblog.com
Instagram: @rustamatic