Cover Story: Rachel Jones
Who is Rachel Jones? Meet the artist behind this year's Bazaar Art cover
Everything you need to know about the groundbreaking young British artist
By Marie-Claire Chappet
If you haven't yet heard of Rachel Jones, the creator of our 2021 Bazaar Art cover, you soon will. The 30-year old creative has long been a favourite of the art crowd but is poised for widespread acclaim thanks to her inclusion in a landmark show this month at the Hayward Gallery. Jones has been selected among 30 artists, including our Bazaar Art guest editor Lubaina Himid, in Mixing It Up: Painting Today a riotous celebration of the medium and its power to speak to the present moment. Three of Jones' works will be exhibited. Another of her majestic paintings lick your teeth, so they clutch (2021), is the bold and beautiful image reproduced on our cover.
Jones was born in London in 1991 and says, though she frequently fought against this impulse, she always wanted to paint. She completed her BA Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art and achieved her MA Fine Art at Royal Academy of Arts, where her work moved from figurative to abstract, while still maintaining its focus on the Black experience.
To support her art, she once had a part-time job in an organic bakery in Clapham, working at a farmers’ market at the weekend. She now works from a studio of her own in Essex and is represented by Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, where she is exhibiting a selection of works from 9 December to 5 January 2022. She has also been shown at The Sunday Painter and institutions such as the Royal Scottish Academy. In 2019, she was artist in residence at The Chinati Foundation and Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art in 2016. Her first artwork to be offered at auction was A Sliced Tooth at Phillips London in 2021.
In our Bazaar Art issue, she sits down with curator and critic Rianna Jade Parker to discuss her motivations, her practice and the messages of her art, as well as the unique challenges of being a Black female artist. "I learned a lot about how to interrogate my own thoughts and feelings through my practice, in a way that I hadn't before," she says, of her time at art school. "I was trying to centre my experience as a Black woman in a space that is predominantly white and, ultimately, not designed for me to thrive."
Time and again, Jones' art explores the complexities surrounding society’s reading of the Black body. In her bold strokes and abstract representations, she elicits cultural conversations and seeks to dismantle existing power structures and perceptions. Her work is colourful for a reason, she says, using it to form a visual language as a substitute for words.
"I'm interested in exploring identity politics in a way that is more experiential," she tells Rianna Jade Parker. "The human figure may come in later, but for me it's more about using space, line, depth and material to stimulate a sensory and bodily reaction in the viewer."
