SURGE – Ian Jones

The entire exhibition can be experienced in 3D by clicking on the ‘SURGE’ button link above or on the link

In ‘SURGE’, Ian Jones turns his camera on the world immediately around him: the city, its monuments and architecture, its people and encounters, its gardens and the vast sky. Theatres, stages and opera feature alongside everyday scenes, creating a visual world in which the ordinary and the extraordinary constantly intersect.

Jones begins each work with his own original photography. His instinctive feel for light, composition and the fleeting nature of a moment enables him to capture scenes with an immediate atmosphere. These photographs then form the basis for a process of digital transformation.

Through image editing and AI technologies, Jones alters, intensifies and reinterprets the original images, creating works that, whilst remaining rooted in photography, evolve beyond photographic reality.

The result is a body of work that is rich and vibrant, brimming with colour and light.

Architectural forms can take on a dramatic quality; gardens and the sky acquire an almost supernatural luminosity; figures and encounters take on a theatrical character. The city itself becomes a stage – a place where people, buildings, nature and light constantly come together in fleeting compositions.

The title ‘SURGE’ reflects this heightened visual experience. It suggests a sudden surge of energy or emotion and mirrors Jones’s approach of transforming a captured moment into something more far-reaching. Rather than merely recording what he sees, he follows the image beyond its original boundaries, allowing intuition and technology to shape new possibilities.

At the heart of Jones’s practice lies the act of seeing. His photographs stem from real encounters and spontaneous moments, yet his subsequent transformations transport the viewer into a more subjective and imaginative realm – somewhere between the familiar and the surreal.

Jones’s work reflects his enduring interest in art history, travel, community, nature and interpersonal relationships. His sensitivity to the ephemeral enables him to discover visual possibilities in the everyday – expanded through observations in new forms.

Ultimately, SURGE is an exhibition about perception: about the moment when seeing becomes imagining, when a photograph is more than just a record, and when the familiar world suddenly appears transformed.