ABOUT Yvonne Jones 
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My work is a deeply personal exploration of what it means to be alive now — in a time shaped by posthuman questions, medical interventions, and shifting ideas of what a human body can be. Through mixed-media, built canvases, painting, and installation, I investigate my own lived experience as a once-younger, now-ageing, female, flesh-and-blood “unit” — altered by technology, marked by medical events, and rich with memory, sensation, and imagination. From the moment I first stood in front of a Francis Bacon painting at 13, art has been my way of making sense of life. The vitality of Van Gogh, the sculptural presence of Giacometti, and Antony Gormley’s phrase “the experiencer on the other side of appearance” continue to influence my thinking. Over time my practice evolved from expressionist figurative painting to incorporate video, installation, and built canvases — shaped by the ideas and works of Orlan, Jo Spence, Marina Abramović, and Robert Rauschenberg. My encounter with the concept of the posthuman reframed how I saw my own body — especially after internal lens replacement surgery and later, a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. These experiences sharpened my curiosity about corporeality, memory, and identity. I began working with medical imagery, self-observation, and multi-sensory documentation, recognising that the body may know more than the conscious mind. Today, my work navigates the literal and philosophical paths toward the posthuman, reflecting on how we live, adapt, and construct identity in this technological moment. My pieces are held in the Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge; Gwynedd Museum, Bangor; and in private collections in the UK and US.

I cannot agree with Stelarc’s claim that “the body is obsolete” — awareness brings choice, and our bodies remain central to experience. Hans Moravec’s prediction that “the senses have no future” troubles me, because without senses there is no experience. Through my art, I explore and expose my own lived experiences — drawn from the corporeal, flesh-and-blood body, from senses and emotions, compassion and empathy, disease and mortality. Experience, for me, is what makes our now-human life rich and varied. Do we truly want an existence without it?
By questioning the relationship between human and posthuman, my works engage with socio-transformative issues. My born-female body brings feminist concerns into the conversation, as in Peeling the Body, which interrogated gender in the modern day and imagined the possibility of a posthuman subject sidestepping — or rising above — these inequalities.
The posthuman can be understood in two ways: the literal vision described by Moravec, where human consciousness is transferred into a machine to achieve immortality, and the philosophical view outlined by Katherine Hayles, which accepts some posthuman notions but still embraces our mortality. My own practice navigates between these positions, grounded in the physical, sensory, and finite nature of lived experience.