Rachel Jones creates sculpture, paintings and works on paper. Known for her distinctive way of blending abstraction and figuration together to express the intangible, her paintings grapple with the challenges of finding visual means to convey abstract, existential concepts.
Jones’s most recent body of work has been a series of paintings made from oil stick and oil pastel that allude to the mouth and teeth. Her own identity and agency add to the complexity of the layers within her work. Repeated titles and motifs such as the mouth and teeth are indicative of Jones’s practice, creating a relationship across her works. A Sliced Tooth is the name given to the work for Pallant House Gallery, for example, but there are several other works with this title, which Jones has been using since 2020. A Sliced Tooth is a diptych that consists of two teeth with white bases, over-painted with vibrant reds and muted greys. These layers of oil pastel and oil stick are built up to create a sense of physical and metaphorical depth, with the imperfect, raw-edged canvases producing works that almost resemble landscapes.
The gallery has been looking to strengthen the presence of female artists who explore identity in their collections and exhibitions. In 2019 an exhibition entitled Radical Women was on display exploring 20th-century abstract women artists in Britain who engaged in progressive art and politics. Jones’s paintings are informed by her research into the depiction of Black figures in the arts from the eighteenth century to the present, how they are understood and culturally reproduced, and the potential role of these representations in dismantling existing power structures. Jones’s work continues this conversation, through the exploration of contemporary painting and Black history.
