Rima Staines
Affiliation: Indepenent
Panel: Magical Material Practice
Rima Staines is an artist whose work straddles myth, magical realism and the folk arts. Her work explores 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. Rima’s visual world is steeped in melancholy, story-rich and alchemical. Her detailed paintings are often made with oils on found wood - icons rooted in animism that feel simultaneously both strange and familiar.
She has a long-held fascination with the idea of the liminal - the edges and hedges, the 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”.
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 and 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.
"There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in" describes a kintsugi-truth that we all instinctively understand. Indigenous makers have always known that an intentional flaw in a piece of craft is a necessary inclusion. Artist Rima Staines will present examples of her own artworks, which display a trademark sense of uncomfortable oddity in the people and worlds she paints, alongside an examination of the necessity of imperfection, aberration and strangeness in the upholding of soul and generation of enchantment in art making and beyond.