John Rainey: Selected works, 2021-2025
Decoys and Ghosts, 2025
Decoys & Ghosts brought together new and retrospective work by Belfast-based sculptor John Rainey. Primarily working with Parian porcelain—a historical mimic of marble—and combining traditional casting with digital fabrication, Rainey creates artefacts that seem to have slipped in from an alternate reality: a space where the boundaries between authenticity and imitation, tradition and disruption, are blurred, and where the familiar often turns strange. His sculptures are not illusions meant to deceive, but rather forms that explore unsettling feelings, inviting viewers to question their perceptions of identity, history, and material truth.
The sculptures emerge from a practice preoccupied with transformation, where fragmented bodies shift into animal forms or blend with architecture, and plinths morph into theatrical installations and creaturely constructions. These altered display mechanisms amplify the sculptures’ strangeness, positioning them as relics from a place with different rules—where histories may have unfolded differently, and fixed identities dissolve.
Rainey’s work resists easy narratives, preferring instead to hold space for contradictions: ghostly yet tactile, elegant yet strange, historical yet speculative. In this realm, imitation becomes a tool not of deception, but of possibility—an invitation to imagine new states of being and to dwell in their uncertainty.
“Decoys and Ghosts leads us in a darker direction than Rainey’s previous work, reflecting our increasing disorientation, perhaps, with the world around us. Rainey deliberately leaves traces of digital creation, his modified copy, his version of what is seen, his own Frankenstein. A careful layering disrupts a stable acceptance of what ‘sculpture’ and installation should be when presented in a formal gallery. This wry commentary on art history, reproduction and contemporary ideals leaves us with a sense of uncertainty and even fear, prompting us to question what we are witnessing and what we might yet see.” Excerpt from John Rainey – Decoys and Ghosts, an exhibition text by Mary Stevens, Exhibtions Officer, Golden Thread Gallery.
OTHERLAND, 2024
OTHERLAND is a space occupied by alternative versions of classical archetypes, from Myron’s Discobolus to the Belvedere Torso. Rainey engages in what he describes as ‘acts of sculptural remixing’, using processes that range from the contemporary (3D printing) to the traditional (mould making and slip casting). His remixes disturb the familiarity of these well-known forms, exploring possibilities beyond expectations.
Rainey’s impulse to re-work, and destabilise established models shows itself clearly in his approach to the tradition of slip casting. As a process of mass manufacture in the ceramic industry, slip casting is fundamentally concerned with uniformity. Rainey hacks into this system of unvarying repetition to unlock the possibly of endless variation, using an extensive library of moulds to create composite casts. At times appearing to morph from human into animal, from solid into liquid, or mixing bodily with architectural motifs, the variations and reconfigurations Rainey creates celebrate their defiant difference. These scrambled forms reflect Rainey’s interests in concepts of shapeshifting drawn from Irish folklore, and the notion of the carnivalesque as a space in which conventional order is overturned. Both are explored as worlds in which states are flexible, forms are fluid, and social boundaries are unsettled.
STATE SHIFT, 2022
STATE SHIFT explores the historical movement of sculptural copies between materials, scales, and geographical locations. Through transformations and material illusions, Rainey reflects on the ability of these forms to shift associations and meanings in different contexts and time periods, with an emphasis on their existence in digital space and time.
While the Roman tradition of producing copies of original Greek sculptures implies repetition and same-ness, Rainey’s sculptures take inspiration from the slippages and variations that creep in during the act of reproduction and subsequent restoration. STATE SHIFT features five versions of the Discobolus, a sculpture which was copied numerous times (often with distinctive differences) after the Greek master Myron’s now lost original. In a British Museum Press publication focusing on the historical flexibility of the Discobolus, curator Ian Jenkins describes that ‘[t]o Nazi Germany, it was a trophy of the mythical Aryan race [whereas] on a London transport poster for the 1948 Olympic Games … it was emblematic of the triumph of democratic freedom over fascist tyranny’.(1) Rainey revisits this and other historical forms, and their shifting meanings, through acts of sculptural remixing – where digital scans released by museums are manipulated through a series of transformations and processes including 3D printing, porcelain casting, slicing, re-joining and surface printing.
STATE SHIFT presents us with states of uncertainty and disrupted expectations. Existing in a matrix of contradictions, disguise and disruptive patterns, Rainey’s re-configurations inject the possibility of alternatives and difference into classical forms usually associated with static ideals.
(1) Ian Jenkins, The Discobolus, London, British Museum Press, 2012, p. 5.
SLIP TANK, 2021
SLIP TANK is part laboratory, part playground, with sculptures and installations concerned with things not being as they seem. Exploring portals, post-internet worlds, and sculptural glitches, Rainey makes reinterpretations and remakes of familiar forms using both old and new methods of object making; a combination of traditional casting processes (using materials like porcelain) and digital fabrication technologies such as 3D printing.
Within the exhibition, Rainey references the museum, the home, and the city, treating each as fluid and elastic. Presented in a state of non-fixity, and resisting the idea that things are only ever one thing, the sculptures in SLIP TANK are beacons of possibility. In deviating from their original and recognisable forms, they hint at alternatives, questioning what happens when we remove boundaries and disrupt expectations.
Rainey’s sculptures appear as if they are in motion, seemingly moving through the Naughton Gallery on specially designed pedestals that feature wheels and handles. An optical illusion to the rear of the space hints at an alternate realm where these works have originated from. This is a place between the physical and the digital, where playful experiments with a Greco-Roman sculptural aesthetic meet industrial fabrication and the language of machines.
