In Kites for a Model Universe, Jonah’s constructions for drawing catch air. This series of suspended works proceeds from his ‘billboards’, those many-legged, striated forms that have long populated the artist’s practice. Support, structure, scaffold – how might the picture plane be drawn into space? Reminiscent of Chinese and Japanese traditions, the simplicity of Jonah’s kites (wooden bridle, fabric wings) at once suggests and undermines the objects’ implied function. His ink-and-brush drawings on calico are similarly spare. Four intersecting lines for a star, five more in parallel arrangement for a cloud, an arrow; a diagrammatic language distilled from the artist’s associative engagement with navigation and its grammar. Weather and rain, the sky, such things are familiar in Jonah’s work, as is the provisionality of his mark making, the intuitive lightness of his drawings set against the delicate rigidity of a wood-dowel structure. Suspended in space, these kites appear as fragments taken from meteorological maps or the many pages of an astrological book, aspiring to the heavens they describe.

Contact Daniel@a4arts.org to view all the works in the series.