To Be Free Painting

Rachel has made work all of her life to translate aspects of experience escaping spoken language. Her painting practice uses analogue and digital processes. She manipulates found imagery by hand and in Photoshop, to produce a foundational composition for painting. The images share a loose conceptual framework in which meaning can shift and emerge. Arbitrary contrasts trigger a process of reconciliation, while content divested of context simultaneously liberates and disorientates. The work is inherently political in its free disengagement with and re-invention of content. Composite images are transferred to canvas and warped within Classical conventions of painting. Thus the work speaks to changing mores of value systems. Rachel is interested in image trajectory and staying power—in memory, hard drives or transmission over the Internet. By re-presenting signs and symbols, she highlights an ambiguity of native origin behind their enduring presence, as recirculated shorthand for fictive and historical narratives. Influences are vast, but important among them are ideas of Jacques Rancière, Heidegger and performance art theorist Peggy Phelan, whose work on negation and the phantom (Female) body also resonates in Rachel’s curatorial practice and work with other artists.