About
Jonathan is the son of a New Zealand mother and English father and has lived in the UK, France, Italy, Russia, Hungary and Montenegro. As well as his work as a photographer, artist and writer, he is an award-winning entrepreneur working within fintech, real estate and the IoT (the internet of things), a former actor and a pioneering gallerist, who founded the first gallery in London exclusively devoted to representing contemporary artists from the former Soviet Republics.
Jonathan is currently based in Budapest, where he is working on a new photographic project to document rural life in the Balkan region and a variety of conceptual projects exploring the boundary between the digital and physical, the problem of authenticity and value, and including video, digital representation, voice and writing.
Before studying Russian and Italian at the University of Oxford Jonathan worked as a junior expert for Christie’s in Rome and spent six months travelling in Ukraine and Russia, where he spent time living with Cossacks in the Caucasus and an Old Believer community on the Sea of Azov. In 2000, immediately prior to the September 11th Attacks in the US, Jonathan spent 6 months travelling in the Southern Caucasus region and Central Asia, visiting the disappearing Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, hanging out with Afghan drugs runners in the Karakum desert in Turkmenistan, narrowly missing being involved in a lethal gun battle on a road in northern Georgia, but not missing being drugged, robbed and having his jaw broken in the foothills of the Tien Shan range in eastern Kyrgyzstan.
Following university Jonathan trained as an actor in Paris, before returning to London where, while acting in short film and fringe theatre productions, he founded New Realms, a gallery staging commercial and non-commercial exhibitions featuring contemporary works from the former Soviet region and encompassing everything from Lithuanian video art to Tajik oils. Some of the artists represented by New Realms have since gone on to represent their countries at significant international events, including the Venice Biennale. From 2007-2014, Jonathan lived and worked in Russia, continuing to create while at the same time serving as the CEO of an Arctic goldmine in the remote Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region and prior to that, running forestry companies in Eastern Siberia, which were listed on the stock exchange in Stockholm in 2010.
Although Jonathan’s artistic output has typically been of a non-commercial nature or created for private commissions, his work is held in private collections in Russia, the UK and France.