Jan Murphy Gallery proudly presents Midnight Blue, the inaugural solo exhibition by Archibald Prize–winning artist Laura Jones.
This new body of work offers a tender, atmospheric exploration of colour, memory, and emotional resonance. Jones turns her gaze inward to moments of quiet beauty and vulnerability—flickers of late-night conversations, the hush of a still room, the deep calm of dusk.
“In Midnight Blue, everything is revealed in passing,” writes author Lech Blaine. “It moves like the middle of a conversation you’ve just walked into: intimate, unfinished, and strangely familiar.” These paintings gently hold emotional truths, grounded in colour and form, memory and the present.
Jones describes the works as a response to anxious times and a fragile world. “It emerged from a yearning for the colour blue, and the sense of quiet it brings,” she explains. “Often, it’s a bunch of flowers. Other times, it’s a late-night moment with friends. I paint to remember a feeling—nostalgic, aching, and fleeting.”
This sense of place and time is also deeply rooted in her personal story, having recently returned to her hometown in the green hills of regional New South Wales. Memories of her childhood home—its timber and glass walls, the ever-present view of trees—echo through her painterly gestures.
Winner of the 2024 Archibald Prize with her portrait of Tim Winton, Jones is a celebrated voice in contemporary Australian painting. Her work can currently be seen in Tender at Ngununggula (Bowral), and she has previously been a finalist in the Archibald, Sulman, and Wynne Prizes. Jones has completed residencies across Australia and internationally, including in Antarctica and the Great Barrier Reef.
Midnight Blue offers viewers a space to pause—where warmth, nostalgia, and uncertainty coexist in gentle equilibrium.
Image: Dream state, 2025
Oil on linen, 153 x 198 cm
