lick your teeth, they so clutch (2021) by Rachel Jones

Rachel Jones describes the experience of viewing her paintings as ‘feeling with your eyes’. ‘I have always been interested in the potential for colour to be used as something which... has an emotional and psychological meaning’, she says. 

Colour for her is also physical – something to be experienced with the whole body. She sets out to make paintings that provoke a kind of sensory overload, that overwhelm and stimulate their viewer and that seduce and antagonise in equal measure. 

To make lick your teeth, they so clutch (2021), Jones applied colour to the canvas using oil sticks and pastels, rather than paint and brushes, while the vast, raw-edged canvas is left unstretched and, when displayed, is pinned directly to the wall. 

At first glance entirely abstract, this huge painting in fact features an image of a row of multicoloured teeth. Grinning or grimacing, bared in pain or pleasure, teeth are a recurring motif in Jones’s paintings. The lines that delineate these teeth are porous: bold, gestural marks bleed through, reflecting the mouth as a gateway to the inner body, through which words, sound and breath all travel. 

For Jones, teeth have layers of meaning, contemporary and historical, full of joy and pain. They might speak of the Atlantic slave trade, when teeth of enslaved people were assessed as an indicator of health or strength, but also refer to self-empowerment, self-expression and adornment – the teeth in this painting are at least partly inspired by images of Black men and women wearing gold and diamond grills. 

The work’s title, lick your teeth, they so clutch, is a direct address, a call to action both celebratory and seductive, an instruction to enjoy one’s own ‘creative and stylistic flamboyance’.

This essay first appeared in the Mixing It Up: Painting Today exhibition catalogue.