238. Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury - Llanw o Dan y Graig (Tide Beneath the Rock)

2026
oil paint, pigment and oil stick on slate
12.7 _ 17.8 cm
Signed on Verso

Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury is a London-born contemporary painter whose practice explores material memory, mythology, geological time, and the emotional resonance of surface. With maternal Welsh heritage informing aspects of her recent research, she works across canvas, linen, and reclaimed Welsh slate, using oil paint, pigment, oil stick, and mixed-media processes to create works that move between abstraction, landscape, and artefact.

Her paintings often develop through layering, abrasion, staining, and intuitive gesture, allowing materials to retain traces of time, labour, and transformation. Recent research has focused on slate as both support and subject — a material tied to extraction, fracture, ancestry, and inherited landscape. Through painting on broken slate fragments, Salisbury reimagines stone as relic, icon, offering, and contemporary image. Alongside this sculptural and material enquiry, her larger paintings investigate atmosphere, movement, and psychological states through luminous colour and shifting forms, balancing sensuality with historical consciousness.

Salisbury is currently completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London (2025–2026), supported by the Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award. She previously completed the Turps Banana Studio Programme, London (2016–2018), where she received the Darbyshire Prize for Emerging Artist, and an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, London (2015–2016), supported by the John Hoyland Scholarship.

Recent exhibitions include Salon in Peckham Rye, London (2026); Mythic Manifest at Love Waxes Cold, curated by Jennifer Smith (2025); POST//FUTURE at the Saatchi Gallery, presented by Delphian Gallery (2025); The Reactor Fundraiser at The Sunday Painter, London (2024); Papier Vol. II with Delphian Gallery, Helsinki (2024); Matrescence at Unit 1 Gallery Workshop, London (2023); I Know Not How It Falls On Me in Bruton, UK (2023); Reverdie in Edinburgh (2023); and Art on a Postcard at Soho Revue Gallery, London (2023). Earlier exhibitions include Chthonia (Edinburgh, 2022), Showstopper and Synthesis at Saatchi Gallery (2022), Global Song at Tang Contemporary, Hong Kong (2022), and Small Is Beautiful XXXVII at Flowers Gallery, London (2019).

Awards and distinctions include the Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award (2025–2026), the Unit 1 Gallery Workshop Solo Residency Award (2023), the SPACE Artists Grant (2020), Overall Delphian Open Call Winner and the Artpiqer Painting Award (2019), the Darbyshire Prize for Emerging Artist (2018), the John Hoyland Scholarship (2015), and the Rome Art Program Scholarship (2013). Her work is held in private collections across the United Kingdom, Europe, Hong Kong, and the United States.