Rima Staines
Rima Staines is an artist whose work straddles myth, magical realism and the folk arts. She has worked over the years predominantly as a painter, but also with music, writing, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, theatre, puppetry, animation and book arts. In 2018 she was a finalist in the 'Best Artist' category of the World Fantasy awards. She is a mother to two young sons and lives in Devon.
Rima has a long-held fascination with the idea of the liminal - that which lies at the edge of culture and society as well as the literal boundaries between one place and another, both metaphorical and real - and with the power of art that comes from that place. Her work is a kind of “Iconography of the Otherworld”.
Fascinated by how talismanic, apotropaic imagery has been used throughout human history to make real magic, she has a strong belief in the power of art to change things, and thus her work is simultaneously alchemy and activism.
Stories, too, play a fundamental role in Rima’s work - she believes that they speak truth to us in a similar non-linear language to that which imagery speaks, and that we need them more than we think we do: inside them are old maps back home.
www.rimastaines.com
Go Wherever You Wish, for Verily You Are Well Protected
For this exhibition I am displaying part of an ongoing series of painted amulets, created in order to make visible, to transmute and to heal specific hurts, traumas and challenges that my life has brought me in recent years. These are a series of oil paintings on wood - a medium I have worked with for years - but here they also include other dimensions and materials: thread, metal, thorns, prayers. This practice is the vulnerable and powerful act of standing up and using my art as medicine for myself, showing that I believe in its power, not merely as words in an “artist’s statement”, but as actual, tangible alchemy.
My series of works will be presented in a small, hidden, sanctified place, so that you can see them close and quiet.