Artist: Rebecca Clare Wallis

Bio from Artist’s website

Wallis breaks and restructures the traditional painting to reconsider expectations and question the certainty of the tangible - of surface, edges and boundaries.
She makes analogies between the painting and the Self, and considers the strange allusive subjective moments between self and Other, Subject and object, as her raw material. Her works consider the uncertain material that edges and falls between the self and its own otherness. This state, as a non-fixed, more fluid state, is a state that parallels the processes of the feminine body.
These momentary subjective experiences that she describes as a kind of “Unsaid Turning”, and are a kind of slipping away and resisting containment from the conditioned Self.
“It’s a universal experience at moments felt by us all subjectively, and takes the Self out of its conditioned narrative of words and out of time. Like Lacan’s theories of the Real, this momentary Turning is like the glitch in the matrix. It’s like a continuum of the Self that can’t be inserted into our culture. It’s Abjection. It’s like the difference between numbers and water. Its more, it doesn’t fit and is uncanny” “It is when the ’I’ collapses, when who I think I am ruptures and what remains is this strange experience of facing my own existence”.

From James Makin Gallery website, 2024

With her texturally rich transparent silk canvases, swirling with deep painterly marks, Rebecca Wallis’ practice questions the separation created through desires to fix, and hold. Her work reviews the meaninglessness of our existence. When the ‘I’ collapses, when “who I think I am ruptures and what remains is this strange experience of more”. 

Her constructions consider a formal equality where each and every part of the object is visually acknowledged, where the unseen becomes seen.  She intends to open spaces up for experiences that reconsider our expectations made from the certainty of the tangible – of surface, edges and boundaries. She deconstructs and reforms her silk supports and the ‘traditional’ painted surface, reconfiguring them into something on the precipice – but just outside – of recognition. 

TAKE AWAYS: The visibility of the frame from behind the stretched fabric. The translucency, showing and yet not showing clearly through. The contradiction of silk and staining and abstract painterly marks. Discussions around the subject and object, the rupturing of the ‘I’, the reckoning on the canvas of one’s own existence, the working it out on the canvas. Like smears and fluid markings left behind, the presence of a happening. The disruption to the hierarchy of the canvas, fabric hanging loosely from below. Which surface are we supposed to focus on when we can partially see through.