The Alchemist Painting

Rima Staines is an artist whose work straddles myth, magical realism and the folk arts. She has worked over the years predominantly as a painter, but also with music, writing, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, theatre, puppetry, animation and book arts. In 2018 she was a finalist in the 'Best Artist' category of the World Fantasy awards. She is a mother to two young sons and lives in Devon. Rima has a long-held fascination with the idea of the liminal - that which lies at the edge of culture and society as well as the literal boundaries between one place and another, both metaphorical and real - and with the power of art that comes from that place. Her work is a kind of “Iconography of the Otherworld”. Fascinated by how talismanic, apotropaic imagery has been used throughout human history to make real magic, she has a strong belief in the power of art to change things, and thus her work is simultaneously alchemy and activism. Stories, too, play a fundamental role in Rima’s work - she believes that they speak truth to us in a similar non-linear language to that which imagery speaks, and that we need them more than we think we do: inside them are old maps back home.