Nationally recognised, Blue Mountains-based contemporary artist Locust Jones presents The green dream at The Lock-Up in 2025. The exhibition surveys the artist’s intimate and internal lens through which he has interpreted global politics throughout his distinguished career, to capture the tension between international events and the immediate, tangible realities of daily life.

Diaristic drawings, rendered in ink on paper, entangle fragments of world news with reflections on the artist’s personal—and tumultuous—lived experiences, offering a raw, unfiltered experience of how the contemporary chaos of the infosphere, or hypermodernity, intersect with psychological experience. Each work is product of a moment in time, layered with the immediacy of his chosen material to reflect both permanence and fragility.

Accompanying the artist’s works on paper are skull-like ceramic sculptures, seemingly carbonised personages in a deep charcoal hue; for the artist, they offer a visceral confrontation with mortality and the enduring weight of human history. These haunting forms both ground and guide the dreamlike experience of the exhibition, serving as reminders of the corporeal and the inevitable. Wandering through both small to monumental scale drawing, large paintings in acrylic and oil suspended strikingly in the former Exercise Yard, the titular work awaits audiences: The green dream, 2025.

Descending into the oneiric haze of one of The Lock-Up’s historic cells, The green dream unravels the internal landscape through which the artist interprets and makes his grim auguries on paper, canvas, sculpture and film. The surreal, forest like enclosure sets the atmospheric tone alongside the old male lockup cell in which it is located: infusing the work with the heady claustrophobia of a nightmare, echoing the constraints of social structures and personal introspection.

The green dream invites viewers to wander through this interplay of thought and artefact, grappling with the fluid boundary between the public and the private, the ephemeral and the eternal.