RACHEL JONES
Rachel Jones (b. 1991, London, UK) completed her Masters Degree at the Royal Academy Schools last year and was awarded the André Dunoyer de Segonzac Hon RA Prize before exhibiting alongside Gillian Ayres and Nao Matsunaga at the New Art Centre, Salisbury (September – November 2019). Jones has held residencies at both The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas in 2019 and the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art, Bermuda in 2016.
Jones presents a series of new paintings that explore the complexities of society’s readings of the Black body – how it is understood, how it is culturally reproduced, and the potential role of these representations in dismantling existing power structures. Jones's presentation includes a number of large-scale hanging pieces alongside smaller works on unstretched canvas and paper pinned to the wall.

Jones is interested in creating images that explore the Black Interior, the depth of her own interiority and how, as a Black woman, it consists of an autonomous, imaginary, and multifaceted experience. This exploration of personal identity set against society’s readings (and representations) of Blackness throughout history has led Jones to develop a deeply personal approach to abstraction, whereby representation – particularly of Blackness and the Black body – is explored as both reinforcing existing power structures and as having the power to disrupt them.

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. – Rachel Jones
Rather than literally depicting the figures her work seeks to represent, Jones applies a form of critical interpretation to the language of painting, reconsidering both traditional and contemporary approaches to colour, form and motif. In response to these approaches, she explores self-expression as a bodily, visual and visceral experience, not only in the subject-matter of each piece but in the artist’s physical engagement with their production. Jones is interested in eliminating a literal depiction of self, instead focusing on a sense of self in relation to the sovereignty of her inner life and the expression of this through a kaleidoscopic palette and boldness of form.
A number of the new works on display feature recurring motifs or symbols such as mouths or teeth, dominated by fiery red tones. These subtle recurrences place the paintings in dialogue with one another and allude to their kinship as part of the artist’s ongoing investigation. Together they present an exploration into the construction of individual or representative identities within an existing system, while simultaneously becoming physical records of different chapters in Jones’s research and her own relationship with representations of self. Developing a unique abstract language, the artist uses colour and form as a way of processing complex existential ideas – the hints of figuration present in her works appear only indicatively, suggesting the limits of depictions of the external (of figuration), when attempting to express the internal (experience and emotion).

For me, it's a matter of being able to explore different ways of making ... to escape the rigidity of working within the structure ... I don't want it to be a comfortable image to take in, so I try to create as much friction as possible, to create a certain level of complexity. – Rachel Jones

DONA NELSON
Dona Nelson (b. 1947, Grand Island, Nebraska, USA) has an oeuvre spanning fifty years that has been exhibited internationally. Incorporating a variety of approaches to both image and material, Nelson is most recognisable for her two-sided stain paintings, in which the artist works on both sides of a stretched canvas. These characteristic paintings constitute a significant element of Nelson’s ongoing practice and a selection of these large-scale works will be presented in the upcoming exhibition.
Dona Nelson has ... proven to be one of the most relentlessly searching, rigorously idiosyncratic, and technically inventive painters alive. Her recent, hypermaterialist field paintings, often translucent, two-sided and suspended in free space, have become landmarks ... for younger painters seeking to extend the experimental possibilities of the New York School. – Brooks Adams, contributing editor, Art in America

Throughout her career, Nelson has created gestural abstract works that employ unorthodox materials, processes and formats to disrupt conventional ideas concerning painting, modes of display and ways of looking. Painting ‘en plein air’, the artist approaches the canvas as both a conduit and a ground, using buckets of paint and tools such as spatulas or high pressure hoses to work on her canvases. Nelson begins her two-sided paintings by throwing a net of gel-soaked cheesecloth onto the canvas, which dries to form linear grooves that direct the flow of the liquid acrylic that she pours on, before repeating the process and then removing or adding elements in turn. The direct pour of diluted acrylic paint acquires a new and unexpected appearance as it soaks through the canvas to the other side. As a result, one side of the painting often has a denser materiality, while the other takes on an illusionistic and imagistic quality.