Rima Staines
Rima Staines is an artist whose work straddles myth, magical realism and the folk arts. She graduated in 2003 with a First Class Honours degree in Book Arts & Crafts from the London University of the Arts. Since then her work has explored the edges of culture and consciousness in media from painting, music, writing, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, to clock making, mask making, theatre, puppetry, book arts and animation.
Her paintings have been exhibited and published internationally and hang in many private collections worldwide.
She was co-founder and co-director of the Hedgespoken travelling storytelling theatre and small press. 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 and works in South Devon halfway between the moor and the sea.
Affiliation: Independent Artist
From the beginning myth and folklore have been the ground from which my work has grown. My visual world is steeped in melancholy, story-rich and alchemical. I often paint in oils on found wood, creating works that are like icons rooted in animism.
Viewers often describe a sense of strangeness in my work: something both familiar and unsettling. This suggests to me that I am making doorways. The Otherworld, which lies just alongside this one, always announces its proximity with the feeling of strangeness. It is a place humans have always been in relationship with, and art remains one of the oldest and most potent ways of reaching it.
I have a long-held fascination with the idea of the liminal - that which lies at the edge of culture, society and consciousness as well as the boundaries between one place and another, both metaphorical and real - and with the power of art that comes from that place. The Otherworld is not only something we seek; it is something that calls for us in return.
My paintings are talismanic, inhabiting that boundary, opening passages in the imagination and inviting the viewer to step across.