“I think we often want things to be resolved so that we can understand them,” Rachel Jones told me from her studio in London. “And it’s like, well, sometimes you can understand things in a more complicated way.” Jones’s work has always grappled with liminality: between painting and drawing, abstraction and figuration, the past and the present. She has been working as a painter for more than a decade now, after studying at the Glasgow School of Art and getting her master’s at the Royal Academy Schools in London in 2019. As she moves into a new stage in her practice, she has become even more comfortable working in unresolved—and perhaps unresolvable—ways.
Last fall, Jones cowrote and produced Hey, Maudie, an opera performed at St James’s Piccadilly in London that represented a completely new direction in her work. She described the process of making it as like “leaping off a cliff.” When she returned to painting after, Jones found herself approaching her original medium with a new freedom, an openness to new possibilities. “I think that boldness is a direct link to the experience I had of making the opera—knowing what it is to take steps into the unknown, but having faith in the inherent desire I have to express myself in a multitude of ways,” she said.
A new body of work made for “!!!!!,” her first solo exhibition in the United States, at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco (through September 1), marks the first time Jones has painted on linen rather than canvas. The works still have her signature vibrant color fields made with strong, textured strokes of oil pastel, but for the first time they incorporate significant areas of bare, untouched negative space that bring the texture of the linen support into the composition. “With the linen, I felt like there was already quite a lot happening in the weave and natural dye,” Jones said. That material became a sort of color field in and of itself, rather than a blank space that needed to be filled.
View of the exhibition “!!!!!,” 2024, at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco.
Photo John Wilson White/Studio Phocasso/Courtesy Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco
Jones has long been fascinated by mouths and teeth, using them as a central motif in her works from the 2010s to the present, and often referencing them in the titles of works and exhibitions (including lick your teeth, they so clutch and SMIIILLLLEEEE, both 2021, and the 2020 diptych, A Sliced Tooth). Her mouths do not smile: they speak instead to the long and complex history of the representation of Blackness in art and the many ways we use our mouths to convey meaning.
Language is central to the way Jones thinks and works, despite her paintings’ seeming lack of narrative. She says she gets most of her inspiration from reading rather than looking at other things, and she hopes to find more outlets for her writing practice going forward. Jones’s visceral articulation of purpose helps explain the palpable sense of depth in her paintings. She is fascinated by the challenge of communicating multiple truths at once, constantly navigating the duality between the real and the imagined.
