Rebecca Wallis UK/NZ, b. 1964

Rebecca Wallis was born in the UK, she has lived and practised between London and Auckland since finishing her first degree in Fine Arts in 1988. Her art practice was cemented in 1995 with a Master's Degree in Visual Arts from Goldsmiths College, London. Wallis provokes, using the abject, the allusive experiences of the Real. She makes associations between the corporeal and the painterly, to reveal the 'beyond, behind and beneath'.

Her recent methods characteristically involve simple and unconventional gestures, where she refers to herself as a conduit for the interaction between materials. In her work Wallis often exhibits a slipping away and a resisting of containment, referring to the allusive experience of this understanding, outside that of language, informed by the theories of Kristeva.

Ed hanfling, in a recent essay stated, "Art generally, in recent decades, has shifted from the window-on-the-world metaphor - and also from the modernist negation of the "view" and covering up of the glass pane with the artist's personal sensibility (think Jackson Pollock) - towards the artwork as a mirror onto which viewers project their own ideas and interpretations. Wallis, however, like Kristeva, invokes states of mind, body or being that precede the "mirror stage" of human development, the subject's identification with their own image and subsequent engagement with society through language. Her paintings do not lend themselves so much to "reading" as to the experience of affective, feeling-based responses that cannot necessarily be articulated. The new paintings seem relatively serene and controlled, less to do with bodily discharge, more to do with desire for the "ideal-I" or a unified sense of self. Yet in her unveilings and inversions of paint and support, Wallis permits the "underneath" of the medium of painting to body forth; she enacts the process by which the containing mechanism of the skin is breached by the materiality of things, "the real".*

After Rebecca's solo show in November 2020, she will feature in the SPring1883 art fair in Melbourne before working on another major show in 2021. Rebecca also shows in London, UK.