Poppy Jones at Shin-Zenkoji, Kyoto

Poppy Jones at Shin-Zenkō-ji, Kyoto

Poppy Jones presents her first solo exhibition in Japan at Shin-Zenkoji Temple in Kyoto, the imperial family’s temple of prayer — founded in 1243 by imperial decree of Emperor Go-Saga.

In reverence, in prayer, in meditation, the mind cradles an image which it rocks towards. The body, meanwhile, remains rooted to the temple, to stillness and order and material. In this invocation, one is both here and not-here, a duality captured by Jones in Flights’ launching bird. Its state of take-off has been blotted into perpetuality on the suede, reinforcing photography’s unique ability to seize a single moment while our brains cannot help but complete the flutter. Jones’s bird, therefore, exists in the past: still launching off the branch when our minds have flown it up and forth. The title word “flight” is both literal and temporal — a leap between time zones.

In printmaking, each impression is also a means to travel through time. Jones’s painted prints, often made on clothing that has been cut-up and stretched, are a gesture to a past presence. Works like Alter-ego and In blue, both on silk, illustrate the jacket or shirt that came before. They could also be vehicles toward the future, the title “alter-ego” referencing the ability of clothing to shapeshift one’s body, one’s identity to inhabit a parallel version of oneself.

Shin-Zenkoji also exists as a memory, both in and out of our time. Relocated, rebuilt after fire, the temple has gone through several impressions. Its founding in 1243 was also a form of reproduction: Emperor Go-Saga was concerned by the long, treacherous journeys people were making over mountain paths to the great Zenkoji Temple in Shinano (present-day Nagano), and wanted those ordinary people with strong faith but no means of travel to still be able to receive the blessings of the temple closer to home. The principle statue of Amida Buddha was cast identically to that in Zenkoji, creating a new imprint of an object of devotion that ties it to the existence of an original elsewhere.

In Spring shadows, the silhouettes of flowers and plants a creep across an empty notebook, nature encroaching on the writer’s idea of a fresh beginning. The paper highlights the translucency of the world, the presence nearby of a window, perhaps, and the double-play by Jones now inking those notebook pages not with words but with images, or shadows of images that have become more real than the unwritten script. In the temple, the byōbu paper folding screens — literally “wind walls” — similarly act as thresholds between outside and inside, between nature and culture. Both protective and permeable, like skin or suede, the byōbu both feature and create images, and bring the reverence of foliage into the reverence of the temple. Like Jones’s paintings, they hover, teeter, suspended between movement and stillness, prayer and flight, image and reality, and, in doing so, cast impressions that ripple between past and future.

Text by Phoebe Cripps

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6–10 November 2026

11-16:00

Admission: free

Opening Reception:

6 November, 10am – 1pm