Katie Rhys Jones

How do we claim aerial perspective as our own? How do we orient ourselves toward it, or how are we disoriented by it? From above, Katie Rhys Jones’s painting ‘Travelling Around London (or not)’ combines the experiential and objective aims of landscape painting. Almost but not quite the capital’s tube map, the spacious scale and abundance of tangled lines here is true to its subject – there is plenty for the eye to explore. A map is a highly abstract representation, as well purporting to represent the experience itself of navigation: the artist is clearly invigorated by this duality. Intended by her or not, there is a visual pun here: scale being key to maps, the segmented boroughs of the city look like scales. In ‘Walking Around Solsbury Hill’ the perceptual insight is of the simultaneous immersion and distance from a landscape when looking at it. The mosaic composition gives both the unity of the whole and the parceling into pieces of the scene. Another layer to this visual dichotomy is that of flatness and depth: we see the lines of each form as being next to each other, but the intellect knows that they in fact overlap. Working with distinct blocks of colour, Rhys Jones captures how the human eye imposes divisions onto a scene in order to understand it. In ‘Land’ we get the bones of a landscape, In ‘Sea’ elemental simplicity is also foregrounded: here is spatial and temporal unity, which for all its intellectual concerns radiates an essence that on a medium scale quietly, yet boldly, fills the room. As such it communicates the artist’s care for the natural world, enabled by her practice grounded firmly in it.