David Jones: The Stanley and Jacqueline Honeyman bequest at British Museum Prints and Drawings
18.9.23
Observations by Mataio Austin Dean
Yesterday saw the final day of a small exhibition of works on paper by David Jones. The works included engravings, drawings, and watercolours. These offered a small glimpse into the complex, esoteric, theological, semiotic, historiographical thought of Jones, most well known for his poetry about war and his innovative wood engravings (often combining relief and intaglio processes). The copperplate engravings presented here make up a small part of his renowned 1929 series of illustrations for the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.
In the images, subject and object are folded into and out of each other, foreground and background are indistinct: the albatross exists only as a series of curved lines in direct relation to the dark arrow that pierces its breast. The equality, steadiness, and continuity of engraved line in the drawing is at odds with the overarching, swirling webs of crosshatched marks that seem to exist on a different plane (as if on another, translucent layer) to that of the lines that make up the images of the boat or its mast and sails. The use of a strong plate tone further gives a sense of indistinctness: the otherworldliness and unity of the sea and air. The engravings have the feeling of being part of one larger piece of paper, and were arranged in the book in a chiasmic system of mirroring. The preparatory drawings demonstrate his experimental approach (being primarily a wood engraver not a copperplate engraver), with an emphasis on simplicity of shape and form.
