Four artists find possibility in the Jones Artist Awards Program

Ahra Cho

Cho moved from Seoul to the United States at 14 and learned English as a second language. Unsure that her meaning always came through, she found freedom from fixed meaning in poetry. She draws in soft and oil pastels, creates ceramics, and writes poetry, all different routes to abstraction.

The drawings Hope is the Thing with Feathers and I Died for Beauty—but Was Scarce belong to a series responding to Emily Dickinson’s poems that Cho reads in a bilingual edition with English facing Korean. Translating poetry into image, she seeks emotional texture in her layers of color and gestural lines, beyond what prose can convey.

For Earth & Ether, Cho made a new ceramic piece paired with a poem of her own, A Dream of Becoming a Name. It is a love letter to her daughter, inspired by children’s books and grounded in warm moments they have shared. As Cho writes, “poetic expression, not clarity, opens a way to quiet hope,” echoing the comfort of the little bird’s tune without words in Dickinson’s “Hope is the Thing with Feathers.”

Cho is a South Korea-born artist based in Houston who works across painting, drawing, ceramics, and poetry.

Works included:

• A Dream of Becoming a Name
• Hope is the Thing with Feathers
• I Died for Beauty

Katrina Moorhead

In Dark Hearth, an oak shelf traces a shifting line across the wall, its shape attuned to the objects it holds and its relationship to our bodies. Moorhead treats the notion of a hearth as a site of warmth and gathering, where unrelated objects share space without friction: Irish peat sod, a frilled murex shell, hearth brushes fitted with bells.

Two framed works speak to resilience and hope. Dark Botanical renders the sea pink—a hardy northern coastal flower which she regards as a survivor—in a sea of black, relieved by bright color and glinting black salt. In Blush, a sliver of rose glass floats over a watercolor of an albiflora lily, lending it color. Altogether, the work holds darkness and possibility in tension.

Moorhead, originally from Northern Ireland, is a Houston-based artist working across sculpture, installation, and works on and of paper.

Works included:

• Dark Hearth
• Dark Botanical
• Blush

Virginia L. Montgomery

Montgomery raises the Texas butterflies and moths that appear in her videos. She films their transformation in a delicate, dreamlike register that carries through to the sound: layered field recordings, bells ringing, and water dripping. In her work, a single moth unfurling its wings becomes an event large enough to hold wonder.

As a neurodivergent artist with AuDHD and synesthesia, Montgomery describes her work as illuminating “her neurodivergent experience of living a life that is hyper attuned to seeing macro details and simultaneously creating uncanny connections," and building work from her “love of the tiny ‘unseen’ details in the cosmos.” In her videos, the pattern of a moth’s wings holds the same weight as the moon, another recurring presence in her work.

Montgomery is a Houston-born multimedia artist and filmmaker working across video, sound, sculpture, and installation. 

Works included:

• Bella Luna
• Butterfly Birth Bed

Carole F. Smith

Smith’s ceramic sculptures draw on memories of growing up in Scotland, where her parents took her to visit standing stones. In her current work, she explores those memories through a meditative process, building up each ceramic piece coil by coil.

During a 2023 artist residency in Greece, Smith encountered a sacred stone while hiking near the Minoan archaeological site of Gournia. Its shape closely echoed work already underway in her studio, affirming her belief in the standing stone as an archetype capable of carrying emotional weight across time.

Surface and color shift her sculptures between past and present. Some glazes create the appearance of weathered stone, sediment, and mineral buildup, while her pastel pinks and yellows give others a distinctly contemporary feel. Rooted in the material world, the works suggest hope in what persists.

Smith is a Scottish-born ceramic artist based in Houston whose practice, long centered on functional ceramics, is expanding into sculptural forms.

Works included:

• Lilac Supreme
• Supreme Power
• Overload
• Sweet Stone
• Divine Goddess