Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury
I am a London-based painter working with oil, oil stick, oil pastel and pigment on canvas and repurposed Welsh slate. My practice explores material memory, landscape and transformation, with particular attention to the histories already carried by the surfaces I use.
In my recent slate paintings, the stone is more than a support. Its weight, fractures, edges and previous use shape the image from the beginning. I work responsively, allowing forms to emerge that suggest landscapes, chambers, flames, vessels, thresholds and apparitions. The paintings move between abstraction, artefact and imagined place.
My approach is informed by geological time, extraction histories and my Welsh family connections to coal and slate mining. I am interested in how material can hold traces of labour, shelter, damage and endurance, and how painting can bring those histories into contact with more personal experiences of motherhood, care and bodily change.
Rather than treating landscape as a fixed view, I approach it as something remembered, inherited and transformed. Through the meeting of paint and stone, I create works that feel both physical and uncertain: fragments of the earth that also operate as portals into interior, mythic and otherworldly spaces.
Lived Experience
My lived experience is shaped by motherhood, care, neurodiversity and a strong connection to Welsh family history. Becoming a mother changed the direction of my practice, bringing questions of bodily transformation, vulnerability, endurance and invisible labour into the work.
I also draw on my family’s connections to coal and slate mining in Wales. These histories have deepened my interest in materials that carry traces of labour, extraction, shelter and use. Working with repurposed Welsh slate allows me to connect personal inheritance with wider social and geological histories.
As an artist with ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia, I often work through intuition, repetition and physical engagement with materials. My process is responsive rather than predetermined, and I allow the surface to guide the development of each painting. These experiences inform a practice concerned with care, memory, transformation and the ways histories can remain embedded in bodies, landscapes and objects.
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