John Rainey

John Rainey is an artist born in Omagh, Northern Ireland. He currently lives and works between Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Dublin, Ireland. He received an MA in Ceramics and Glass from the Royal College of Art (London, 2012), and a BA in Contemporary Crafts from Manchester Metropolitan University (Manchester, 2009). Rainey’s work has had solo presentations at Marsden Woo Gallery (London, 2013), Golden Thread Gallery (Belfast, 2016, 2025) Naughton Gallery at Queen’s University Belfast (Belfast, 2021) and Berg Gallery (Stockholm, 2019, 2022). His work has also featured in group exhibitions including AWARD at the British Ceramics Biennial (2019). Rainey’s sculptures appear in notable public collections including the UK Government Art Collection, London; Irish National Collection/Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; OPW Irish State Art Collection, Dublin; Ulster Museum, Belfast; the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Dublin; Arts Council of Northern Ireland Collection, Belfast.

Rainey has completed residencies at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design (Stockholm, 2013); The British School at Rome (Rome, 2018); The Digital Stone Project (Gramolazzo, 2023); Eton College Drawing Schools (Windsor, 2023-24). In 2023 he was awarded the Rosemary James Memorial Trust Award – a major award administered by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, directed at makers steeped in material practice.

Rainey’s work involves acts of sculptural remixing, re-working forms from the history of sculpture to explore themes of bodily ideals, gendered expectations and strangeness. Combining digital fabrication with traditional casting techniques, Rainey works with a large archive of plaster moulds to create composite casts in Parian porcelain, introducing errors, variation and proposed alternatives into familiar forms to explore how history, identity, and perception can be disrupted and reimagined.

Through forms that shift, fragment, and mutate, Rainey’s work pushes against certainty as a way of making space for complexity. His sculptures emerge as if from another dimension: a space where bodies explore new possibilities, where history may have unfolded differently, and where transformation is a form of liberation.

Visit John Rainey’s website and Instagram page.