Rachel Jones

Rachel Jones is a painter who was born in Whitechapel, London. She received her BA in Painting and Printmaking at Glasgow School of Art (2013) and a MA in Painting at Royal Academy Schools, London (2019). Her work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art, the Royal Scottish Academy, and the Fleming Collection. She was artist in residence at the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art in 2016 and won the Machin Foundation Painting Prize in 2018.

Jones has described her work as an “exegesis of color,” particularly color as it is used to depict black bodies. Of the new works that were on view at the Locker Plant at the end of August, Jones writes: “This collection of work further develops my interest in using motifs and color as a way to communicate ideas about the interiority of black bodies and their lived experience.”

Positioned in several rooms throughout the Locker Plant—sometimes at eye level on the wall, sometimes much lower, and with a few works placed directly on the floor—were a number of small-scale, abstract, vibrantly colored works on canvas or paper, made with oil sticks, Jones’s tool of choice. One much larger work in the front room was created by enlarging a digital image of a painting and printing it our vinyl, exchanging the tactility of the works on canvas or paper for a high-res, topographical granularity.