27/09/15
Interview: Shani Rhys James
Shani Rhys James: Caught in the Mirror
Connaught Brown
10 September – 2 October 2015
Shani Rhys James grew up in the
theatre. Her mother was an actress and she herself considered following in
these footsteps before going instead to St Martin’s School of Art. Although
primarily a painter, Rhys James also creates installation pieces and kinetic
sculptures, most recently with her mother’s voice reading some of her key
roles. Her paintings too, with their reds and blacks, flock wallpaper and
floral bouquets, appear like stage sets into which female protagonists – not
necessarily self-portraits, but amalgams of memories or feelings – stray and,
all too often, become trapped.
Rhys James paints whole-heartedly,
directly on to the canvas, with no real preconception of how a work will look
once finished. The oil is thick and slathered on with palette knives, brushes
and fingers, before being drawn into or cut across. She doesn’t believe in
pretty pictures and her flowers are certainly not delicate feminine motifs, but
memento mori, cut from their life source, beautiful and intoxicating, but
dying. Sometimes they are so large, so sculpted, they become personae in their
own right.
Coming from a world where those
around her are taking on roles and putting on masks, Rhys James seeks, through
her painting, to remove these facades and reveal what lies beneath – for her, a
particular form of melancholia. Her talismanic mirror accompanies and aids her
in this goal, representing also the looking carried out by viewers, who, drawn
in actively by the plaintive figures, become as implicit and as caught as they
are, facing their exposed realities – past and present – and vulnerable
futures.
Watch the interview here