In 1959 he started at the Royal College of Art in the same intake as Peter Phillips, David Hockney and Derek Boshier. He has also said about his early ambitions: “I wanted to kick over the traces of what was considered acceptable in art. I wanted to find a new language for representation... to get away from the idea that figurative art was romantic, that it wasn’t tough.” Although this new wave of artists were all trying to break boundaries it was Jones who was expelled from the RCA in 1960. He believed this was because they were “horrified at the new developments brewing among their younger students, the college’s academic old guard decided to make an example of someone.” 

Despite his expulsion from the college his work was included in the lauded Young Contemporaries exhibition of 1961 along with his former student cohort. He then lived and worked in New York for a while where he decided to pursue the ‘toughness’ he wanted to engender in his own work. Here he “discovered a rich fund of imagery in sexually motivated popular illustration of the 1940s and 1950s.” As he later explained: “Fetishism and the  transgressive world produced images that I liked because they were dangerous. They were about personal obsessions. They stood outside the accepted canons of artistic expression.” 

In 1964 he was joined by his close friend Peter Phillips and for two years they travelled together throughout the country developing their own styles. On his return to England, Jones began working in sculpture using figures of women as furniture and creating erotic fibreglass sculptures that portrayed women as lugubrious mannequins, often incorporating rubber fetishism and BDSM. Over the years his works have been met with strong protests and when exhibited have been attacked and damaged. He insists “the artist cannot worry about how someone might misconstrue the work.”

Buy his artwork from mainstream galleries here.