Rachel’s evocative abstract landscapes are a response to the environment by exploring dynamic colours and experimental mark making. Working from sketchbooks she records her surroundings, field lines, hedgerows, and patterns of perspective with a painting in mind.
The artist explains: “My paintings are concerned with the way the past intrudes upon the present. Symbols, signs, animal tracks, and claw marks mix with telegraph poles, gates, and fenceposts as we search for ways to remember who we once were by seeking out the wild face of our surroundings. I am a seeker of quiet liminal spaces, the kind that feel awash with the unseen energies of the past. Over the last couple of tumultuous years, many of us have felt called towards the outdoors and its seeming neutrality in the face of global catastrophe. The wildflowers still bloomed, the trees still greened and shed their leaves and the rain and sun still showered and shone. Though we may not be permanent, either individually or collectively, there is solace to be found in the reliable cycles of the natural world and perhaps one of the legacies of this time will be a move towards a more natural and sustainable way of life, not just in the environmental sense but also by abandoning the cycle of busyness and burn out that keeps us estranged from the feel of the earth beneath our feet.”
Rachel graduated in 2001 from Hull school of Art and Design with a degree in Fine Art and has been working in a variety of media for nearly twenty years. She has exhibited widely throughout the UK and in 2021 was the winner of the Mary Moser Prize.
