Rachel Jones Title TBC, 2022
Part 2: 30 x 130 cm (11.82 x 51.19 in)
Rachel Jones investigates a sense of self as a visual, visceral experience, with abstracted motifs of the mouth and teeth suggesting vivid inner landscapes. In her paintings, she grapples with the challenges of finding visual means to convey abstract, existential concepts. She repeats motifs and symbols across series to create associative, even familial, relationships between them, underscoring their kinship as part of her ongoing investigation of identity.
The artist creates a tension or friction in her paintings through their kaleidoscopic palette, boldness of competing forms and interplay of textures, describing them as an ‘exegesis of colour’. Her expressive use of colour becomes a way of provoking or communicating with viewers, who bring their own lived experiences and cultural backgrounds to the interpretation of her works. The same critical eye that Jones turns upon questions of cultural identity and selfhood is applied to the language of painting itself, in works that reconsider both traditional and contemporary approaches to colour and form.