Jonathan Owen

Jonathan Owen is a British contemporary artist born in Liverpool in 1973. He trained in Fine Art at Leeds Metropolitan University and completed an MFA at the Edinburgh College of Art in 2000. Inspired by the act of transformation, Owen’s work often involves painstaking processes that reveal new meanings from existing materials. In his two-dimensional eraser drawings, he meticulously removes ink from reproduced photographs in books using an ordinary rubber to create ghostly, altered images. In three dimensions, he re-carves classical marble sculptures and antique objects, revealing unexpected forms and spaces. Through these reductive techniques, Owen challenges viewers to reconsider authorship, permanence, and the layered histories embedded in familiar imagery and objects.

Early life and education Jonathan Owen was born in Liverpool in 1973 and later moved to Scotland, where he established his practice and academic career in Edinburgh.

Following his formal education, Owen remained engaged with the academic environment and became active as a lecturer and researcher in art at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, where he focuses on sculpture, drawing, and transformative processes. His work explores the systematic transformation of readymade objects and images, applying methods of collapse, destabilisation, and erasure to challenge traditional assumptions about material stability and artistic authorship. He frequently engages with readymade objects and images, transforming them by eroding their original form to create new visual and conceptual propositions. His work frequently engages with ideas around authorship, material transformation, and the residual traces left behind by removal, inviting viewers to reconsider the original meanings embedded within both sculpture and image. The drawings are created entirely by erasure rather than by adding marks, giving them a ghostly appearance.