Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

I make paintings on reclaimed Welsh roofing slate—surfaces that have already been quarried, split, weathered and used. I treat each fragment not as a neutral support but as an object carrying geology, architecture and labour. Its holes, fractures, mineral grain and irregular edges determine the painting’s structure. Oil paint, pigment, oil stick and oil pastel accumulate as strata, stains, blooms and wounds. Exposed stone remains active beside painted passages, so the works shift between landscape, bodily presence and threshold. They do not simply depict landscape; they become material pieces of it. The slate connects the work to Wales and to histories of quarrying and mining that also run through my family. Annwn—the otherworld of the Mabinogion—enters not as illustration but as a way of thinking about passage, transformation and what remains unseen. The paintings hover between artefact, ruin, portal and fragment. Across individual works and spatial groupings, I ask what painting becomes when its support already has a memory and a prior life. The work holds extraction and care in tension: a material shaped by labour reactivated through touch, colour and attention.

Artwork