Alexandria Mooney Jones

Media: Fireworks, Fused Glass, Encaustics, Ceramics, Mixed Media

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Using only lit, burning fireworks, I begin each piece as part artist, part mad scientist. Fireworks as a medium are volatile and unpredictable. All techniques and processes are self-discovered. My first layer is the least controllable of my techniques. Reacting to that layer, I make decisions about composition, selecting areas to mask or burn. Color selection is vague; a red could present as burgundy, fire engine red or pink, depending on my distance to the canvas, as well as the dispersion rate. As the fireworks burn, organic dye is vaporized into colored smoke; depending on the technique I am attempting to achieve, the smoke is trapped or manipulated around and through things set on the canvas for different effects. Unexpected compositional effects, such as burn holes and singed areas, happen when the fireworks misfire or expel the contents onto the canvas in a ball of fire. Although unintentional, these incidents become part of my composition-you cannot erase a burn.
My artwork proves that there is beauty in the experimental, beauty in the unintentional, and sometimes even beauty in trauma. I am attempting to control the uncontrollable. My work is at the mercy of explosives and fire. Fireworks, as a medium, create a tension that pits celebration against trauma. And in the strongest pieces, neither gives way to the other.
Alexandria Mooney Jones a.k.a. The Firework Artist received a BFA from the University of Missouri, Columbia. Although her emphasis was in ceramics, she discovered using fireworks to create artwork while in college and has since developed her own techniques and processes while working with the explosive and at times dangerous medium. The daughter of an art teacher, she was taught to see the potential for art in everything.

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