Baba Yaga's Kin - Otherworld Beings from the Forests of European Folklore - an exhibition by Rima Staines

Born in London in 1979 to the accomplished sculptors James and Pamela Staines, Rima Staines was raised in a world where art was both language and livelihood. Encouraged to trust her calling from the outset, she has followed that path with unwavering commitment, however precarious it might be.

Graduating with First Class Honours in Book Arts and Crafts from the London College of Printing, Rima has sustained a life as a working artist ever since. At the heart of her practice lies a fierce vagabond vision, devoted to the authenticity and beauty of the misfit and the strange.

Her work conjures immersive worlds. Through painting, animation, puppetry, book making, theatre and music, she draws audiences into what she calls the Elsewhere, a place where story, image and sound converge. As co founder of Hedgespoken, a travelling storytelling theatre and publishing press dedicated to myth, poetry and folktale, she carried these worlds on the road from 2016 to 2023.

Rima’s paintings are peopled by intense, otherworldly figures who seem to emerge from shadowed thresholds. Their faces hold longing, memory, grief and hope in equal measure, evoking a dreamlike recognition in the viewer, as though recalling something ancient and half remembered.

For the 2026 theme “Into the Wildwood” Rima’s work feels especially resonant. Her imagery steps beyond the cultivated edge and into the symbolic forest, that archetypal place of transformation, risk and revelation. Like the wildwood of story and folklore, her paintings invite us to wander deeper, to meet the strange, and to rediscover the hidden, instinctive knowledge that waits beneath the trees.

Based in South Devon near Dartmoor, with a studio in Totnes, Rima continues to create work that moves between worlds, offering viewers a path into the tangled, luminous heart of the Wildwood.