AMULETS PROJECT
I am creating these Amulets in order to make visible, to transmute and to heal specific hurts, traumas and challenges that my life has brought me in recent years. These are a series of oil paintings on wood - a medium I have worked with for years - but here they also include other dimensions and materials: thread, metal, thorns, prayers. This practice is the vulnerable and powerful act of standing up and using my art as medicine for myself, showing that I believe in its power, not merely as words in an “artist’s statement”, but as actual, tangible alchemy.
Amulet to Protect Against Lightning Storms in the Brain
Oils on wood, molten metal, old coins, spells
Rima Staines 2023
This is the second piece in my Amulets series, a prayer of healing and protection, a conversation with my Epilepsy.
I chose this piece of burr wood because it looked a bit like a brain. When I began to prepare the surface for painting I found that the centre of the wood was rotten and so I had to carve this part away, but that left a big hole in the middle. I decided I wanted to fill this hole with molten metal. The juxtaposition and alchemy of the mixed materials felt potent and the process and result felt like a mending. I am finding that this project is leading me in directions that I was not expecting and the magic is almost making itself, which is fascinating and awe-inspiring.
Then the painting began. Here the (my) brain is blessed not only with this alchemical mending, but with indwelling angels and a crown of old coins.
Amulet To Make Pain Bear Fruit
Oils on wood, thorns, thread, copper wire, spells
Rima Staines 2023
House Spirit - Broken & Mended
Oils on wood, molten metal, wire, red thread, prayers
Rima Staines 2014 & 2023
This is a large painting I made in 2014 when I was pregnant with my first child. It is a House Spirit - part of my ongoing artistic habit of marrying my creative skills with life's necessary magical practices. The House Spirit is a kind and protective presence who has always lived beside the door of my house, sometimes outdoors (but under cover) and sometimes indoors, gathering life and dust and knocks and presence. He is painted on a huge (taller than me) piece of wood in oils and holds the hearth in his belly and the home in his heart. All around are folk symbols and mythological creatures - bread and horses, chickens and teapots, weaving looms and flowers, sirens and spoons.
Not long after I moved into my new cottage - newly finding my feet as a single mother, struggling to figure out how to make ends meet, and how to mend my heart - the House Spirit got knocked down the stairs and broken. For a while it sat there on my 'to mend' pile. Until I began my Amulets project at the start of this year, and I realised that this was an invitation to make magic. So I mended the broken House Spirit visibly with a seam of metal, with wire and red thread and prayers. My home was patched and different from before, but no longer broken.
I am fascinated by how this process of amulet-making is dictating its own path of mending via my most vulnerable pains. Art as alchemy indeed.
Nowadays he stands happily by my front door, and has begun to be adorned, too.
Amulet to Find the Singer of My Heartsong
Oils on wood, gold leaf, rubies, lace, paper, blackthorn ink, bells, wool, spells
Rima Staines 2024
This piece was born from the wood itself and my longing. The wood (gnarled ivy root perhaps?) I had had in my studio a long time and I had always thought it looked exactly like a heart. It even has arteries in all the right places. When the time came, I knew that it must be made into an amulet. Something about the aged beauty in its cracked surface made me think of the wear and tear a heart gets over a lifetime. The musicians I painted on the surface, whose music winds from them in gold leaf, are playing the music of my spirit. All my life music has been a vital and visceral part of my artistic practice, as well as my anchor to equilibrium. I like to describe it as my mind-altering drug of choice. It soothes and awakens me and tells me the stories that make an old kind of sense to me. It accompanies me as I cross between the worlds. My musical heart lies in a kind of mythic south-east Europe - it is Balkan, Greek, Eastern-European, Jewish, Turkish, Roma… not situated in one actual culture or place but perhaps passing through, having collected tunes along the way. There are minor keys, syncopated rhythms, many languages. There are accordions, fiddles, clarinets and bagpipes and the voices carry my heart across mountains. I have never been able to explain this deep love but I know that in it I can find some key to my own story, my own character and art. This is a love amulet of course, but in a way it is a love amulet for my own heart. I sense that this amulet-making, this spell to find the singer of my heartsong is somehow a blessing to heal my own profound heartbreak and it is a reminder of the tune that is always playing just ahead of me along the road of my life.
