The focus of this month’s Artist Profile is Rachel Jones, whose work lick your teeth, they so clutch, 2021, was recently acquired by the Arts Council Collection and features in the current exhibition Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery.
Rachel Jones’s practice, which includes painting, installation and performance, approaches abstraction through an exploration of her own identity in relation to the depiction of Black figures in art from the eighteenth century to the present. She examines the potential role of these representations in dismantling power structures. Rather than repeating figurative models from history, she experiments with motifs and colour as a way to communicate ideas about the interiority of Black bodies and their lived experience.
“I try to use colour to describe Black bodies. I want to translate all that lust for self-expression into a language that exists outside of words, and instead relates to seeing and feeling with your eyes.”
Jones often repeats symbols and textures, creating close relationships between her works of varying size, from the monumental to the miniature. In her recent series of oil pastel compositions on paper or canvas, such as lick your teeth, they so clutch, 2021, Jones repeats the motif of abstracted mouths and teeth. Portrayed to such a large scale that any sign of the face or body they belong to is obscured, the vibrant patches of paint and pastel seem to form a dense, vivid landscape. Upon taking a step back and viewing her work at a distance, the familial bodily forms begin to take shape.