Mouths speak, chew, swallow and spit. They kiss and they sing. Teeth chatter, grind and decay. They ache and they fall out. Mouths and teeth and lips recur in Rachel Jones’s work. The artist also wants us to think of the interiority of the black body, and what it feels like to be observed in society. These are all parts of the artist’s narrative while she’s working on her paintings. Whatever Jones has in mind, her work is largely improvised; a kind of painting as performance. There are things in her paintings I can’t experience and don’t have access to. Maybe this is true of all art.
Most of the work in say cheeeeese at Chisenhale was completed in the gallery, as Jones worked on a group of small irregular paintings and on a big, wonky, irregularly shaped length of unstretched canvas. Other works were trimmed to size and tacked directly to both sides of a freestanding wall, and yet more are stretched and hung in the usual way. For the first time in many years the gallery windows have been exposed, letting the daylight in. Usually, Chisenhale is a darkened, concrete-floored bunker.
