Viva Lewes Issue #162 March 2020

ON THIS MONTH: ART
Shani Rhys James
Tea on the sofa, blood on the carpet
Heartbreak and tension lurk beneath the surface
of polite domesticity in a new exhibition at
Charleston. Tea on the sofa, blood on the carpet
brings together recent works by the world renowned,
Jerwood Prize winning Welsh painter
Shani Rhys James. On these vast canvases,
scenes from the artist’s past play out again
through the distorting mirror of memory in an
expressionistic, somewhat abstracted style. Several
are blood red and convey a surreal, almost
horror movie intensity while, in others, huge
gimlet-eyed faces silently accuse us. In Rhys
James’s world, ‘domestic’ is emphatically never
shorthand for ‘pretty’ or ‘comforting’.
Rhys James was born in Australia in the 1950s
but moved to the UK in her childhood, a
dislocation that seems to have affected her
profoundly. ‘I’m trying to make sense of my
own personal mythology’, she mused in a recent
documentary. One picture, Glass of Water visits
Rhys James’s mother in bed after a stroke, her
face radiating fear and helplessness. The bed in
which she cowers, metal-framed and somewhat
cage-like, has transformed from a refuge into a
prison. It’s powerful stuff.
Alongside the intensity in this show, however,
it’s worth saying that there’s plenty of beauty on
display – albeit of a slightly wild and untethered
variety. Rhys James’s sense of colour is keenest in
a brace of flower paintings, one of which, Boy and
Bouquet, is a highlight of the show. The blooms
fill the onlooker’s field of vision with paint so
thick they seem to cast their own shadows.
The show has been carefully chosen for Charleston,
and provides an interesting dialogue with the
main collection. The neighbouring gallery offers
a small display examining the work of former
Charleston residents Duncan Grant and Vanessa
Bell, whose own complicated family dynamics
play out across colourful canvases depicting,
Left: Glass of Water (2017). Right: Boy and Bouquet (2017).
Both courtesy the artist and Connaught Brown
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