Rachel Jones SMIIILLLLEEEE

You can use colour and shape and form to speak to people in a way that isn’t about a spoken language, it’s about emotion and inciting feelings that don’t have to be explained or expressed. It’s responsive, it’s instinctive, and a core part of all of us.
– Rachel Jones, 2021

In her new body of work, Rachel Jones investigates a sense of self as a visual, visceral experience, with the motifs of mouths and teeth suggesting vivid inner landscapes. Some of these new works are marked by a shift in her palette, with more muted tones and a reduction in patterning to produce quieter passages, while her flower forms have become more prevalent.

SMIIILLLLEEEE, 2021
Oil pastel, oil stick on canvas
250 x 160 cm

Jones grapples with the challenges of finding visual means to convey abstract, existential concepts in her works. In depicting the psychological truths of being and the emotions these engender, abstraction becomes a way of expressing the intangible. The artist repeats motifs and symbols across her series to create associative, even familial, relationships between them, underscoring their kinship as part of her ongoing investigation of identity.

SMIIILLLLEEEE, 2021
Oil pastel, oil stick on canvas
250 x 160 cm

Watch a video exploring the new paintings, with Vanessa Onwuemezi reading her text written in response to the works in the exhibition

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We begin with colour. The ground. To challenge the order of empty space. What was open filled with juxtapositions of colour endless, plain and rough, influence passing back and forth, ground overlaid by more powerful colour, the first to arrive, to colonise. […] Joy. And violence of opening wounds a tooth-slice, a jagged rip, heavy lined expression glorious glorious as the sunshine hits us, wink of the glint of gold teeth smiling defiance, smiling the bright of day.

– Vanessa Onwuemezi, excerpt from text written on the occasion of the exhibition, 2021

Read Vanessa Onwuemezi's text

Exploring the role of language in engaging with images, the exhibition includes site-specific text and sticker elements. Painted on a wall in the gallery and surrounded by her paintings, the song title ‘SON SHINE’ becomes a prompt to think about the works and the words in a new light, as does the exhibition’s title, SMIIILLLLEEEE.

Vinyl stickers are applied to the floor in dialogue with the paintings they reproduce, with the shifts in scale, materiality and viewing experience complicating the reading of these images.

SMIIILLLLEEEE, 2021
Oil pastel, oil stick on canvas
31.5 x 220 cm

Smiles stretch wide to reveal tombstone teeth that are sometimes adorned with flowers. Recently, the artist has begun exploring ‘teeth adornments like grills and gold tooth caps and their prevalence in Black culture.’

 

SMIIILLLLEEEE, 2021
Oil pastel, oil stick on canvas
160 x 250 cm

‘The flower became repeated as a form to emphasise the idea of having a pattern, or something stuck on the tooth. But now I’m using flowers in different ways and in various scales’. The oversized oral and floral forms emerge and recede from view, suggesting a symbolic and literal entry point to the interior and the self.

 

SMIIILLLLEEEE, 2021
Oil pastel, oil stick on canvas
160 x 250 cm

We smile at our own illusions, eventually. Smile contains the knowledge of what happened here. Mouth-portal into a bottomless depth, adorned with cheap and happy flowers. Joy. Undone, tooth by tooth. Mouth-portal, numinous circle through which exterior becomes interior. The interior that escapes the word, escapes into a beyond black, undone into a frayed noise, a knowing static.

– Vanessa Onwuemezi,  excerpt from text written on the occasion of the exhibition, 2021

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Artist Talk: Rachel Jones & Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Thursday 20 December 2021 | 18:30 GMT
The London Library

Rachel Jones will be in conversation with poet and writer Victoria Adukwei Bulley at The London Library, discussing her current exhibition SMIIILLLLEEEE. They will explore the diverse influences that inform Jones's creative practice, from the written and spoken word to the world of sound. 

  

 

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