Shani Rhys James

Early paintings of interiors revolved around the kitchen table, set with decorated crockery, pots and pans; from behind this protective barrier, mothers and children fixed the viewer with disturbingly direct gazes. Tables and crockery are constants in Rhys James’ iconography, along with the flock wallpaper that began appearing ten years ago - a childhood memory of nights spent in cheap hotels after arriving in London with her mother from Australia. But time and lockdown have wrought subtle changes. The kitchen table still provides a stage for domestic still life settings with figures, but there’s a shift in mood. In more recent paintings, the air of mild domestic ennui hanging over the woman seated at the table with the vase of flowers in Before Lockdown seems to have been dispersed by government - prescribed ventilation.

The woman sitting on the nervously rumpled sheets in Bed no longer seems suffocated by decorative domesticity; she sits in a cell-like space, feet dangling off the ground as if suspended in space between life and death. h. The stark setting of the silent confrontation in iPhone between the woman and the man in bed with his mobile could be from a two-hander by Beckett or Pinter. Recent attempts at décor, where they occur, are not reassuring. The birds on the flock wallpaper in Blackbird threaten to leave their perches and peck at the mother and child. In Rhys James’ imagination, the birdsong people have reported hearing during lockdown is not necessarily benign.

The pandemic-related motifs in recent paintings are not, surprisingly, new to her repertoire; with the instinct of an artistic Cassandra she seems to have been ahead of the Covid curve. The respirator mask in a 2010 self-portrait foreshadows the surgical mask in Nastagio III, one of a series of lockdown images inspired by The Decameron, Boccaccio’s collection of stories set during the Florentine plague of 1348. The heroine of this tale, illustrated by Botticelli, is hunted to death by dogs for refusing her lover’s suit. In Rhys James’ painting the woman’s mouth is covered but not her breasts. The naked fleeing figures decorating the wallpaper and vase of flowers underline her dangerous vulnerability, while the carnival plague-doctor’s mask on the table – a souvenir from Venice - mocks the flimsy protection offered by the surgical mask and the optimism of the flowers.

Lockdown, echoing the pair in Degas’ Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers, which inspired the composition. Since her Australian father sent her a pack of surgical gloves to protect her from the lead in the white paint she used they have become a sort of signature, littering floors and tables in her paintings like shed skins.

There has always been something innately theatrical in Rhys James’ vision, but the inspiration for this new work, though still literary, is more poetic. Musing on transience, she quotes Gerald Manley Hopkins’ The Leaden Echo: ‘How to… keep back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty… from vanishing away?’ The unnatural stillness and quiet of lockdown have made her more aware of the natural cycle in the place where she has now spent more than half her life. The flowers cut from her Welsh garden celebrate the seasons, but they also mark the inexorable passage of time.

In the past, Rhys James has explored concerns with ageing in self-portraits reflected in mirrors, accompanied by female grooming accessories - combs, hairbrushes, bottles of moisturiser - and vases of flowers. But the hand wielding the Black Comb in this exhibition belongs to her daughter-in-law; the vanity baton has been passed to the next generation. There are no mirrors here, and fewer self-portraits. A mature artist at the peak of her powers, Rhys James has moved beyond the personal to the universal.