Eva Jonas is a London-based visual artist and educator. Her practice invites viewers to reflect on our relationship with the natural world, recording where the body mediates how we experience, preserve, and perform within landscapes.
Her projects lean on the processes of collecting and publishing. They are often informed by sculptural pieces and research ephemera, such as visual guides for creative crafts and outdoor activities. Jonas draws on these instructional images to consider the extent to which engagement with the natural world is taught versus innate.
In her work as an educator, she is interested in sensory and inquiry-based approaches to facilitation through the observing and recording of one's surroundings using creative place-making, inviting reflection on ways of recording and inhabiting spaces.
Recent exhibitions include The Natural, Rural and Remote and accompanying workshop, Garden Recordings at Serchia Gallery, Bristol in July 2023, and a group show with (re)structure as part of Brighton Photo Fringe in October 2022. Her first book Let’s Sketch the Lay of the Land was published in October 2020 by September Books.
Eva is currently working on a long-term project with the communities programme at The Royal Academy, assisting on the EPQ in Photography course at The Photographers Gallery and facilitating on a school programme A Gap in the Fence for Camden Art Centre.
From October 2021 to December 2023, she facilitated the Photoworks West Sussex LGBTQ+ Photography Club, acted as an Associate Artists from October 2022 to March 2023 on Leap then Look's Play, Interact, Explore.
Additionally, to this, she has worked with a number of art, community, and heritage organisations including The Dartington Trust,Henry Moore Studios and Gardens, Queer Heritage South, Aspex Portsmouth, Towner Gallery, The Hummingbird Project, Switchboard, and English Heritage’s national youth engagement programme, Shout Out Loud.
Eva is a member of Artist Union England and has taken part in training (most recently September 2023) with Orange Collective on Becoming Trauma Informed in Arts and Wellbeing Practice.
Image above from 'Image Climbing Frames' looking at gestural points in which legs and hands meet to make human climbing frames as part of a commissioned workshop for Corridor, In This Place, April 2023.
Feedback/thoughts/words --->
The students are still talking about the workshop days later. It was such an engaging, inclusive, calm approach that ensured all of the young people could access it at their level.
Tania Banks / Downsview SEN School Brighton, March 2023 as part of PLAY, INTERACT EXPLORE residency at Towner Gallery, Eastbourne.
The LGBTQ+ Photography Club was the first club I'd taken out of school and I was nervous but now it's like a second home - I count down the hours to the next one.
Tilly, Club participant April 2021 - December 2023 Photoworks LGBTQ+ Photography Club