Born in Watford (1965), Rachel lives in Elgin, Moray. She graduated from Moray School of Art, UHI with a first class BA Hons Fine Art Textiles Degree in 2020. She was selected for the RSA New Contemporaries exhibition 2022 and was awarded the Grampian Hospital Arts Trust exhibition Prize 2021. She was selected for the New Contemporaries 5 Exhibition in Nairn 2018 and was awarded The Arts Society Highland Annual Prize for Contemporary Art at this exhibition. She has exhibited in Edinburgh, Inverness, Aberdeen, Elgin, Nairn and Ahillas, Valencia, Spain.
At the RSA New Contemporaries exhibition, March 2022 she was awarded the Fleming Wyfold Art Foundation award and the prestigious Glenfiddich Artist in Residency 2022.
Rachel uses a diverse range of mediums including installation, photography, cast-making, binaural sound-recording and printmaking
Her practice is based around walking and the concept of place, considering how interactions can bring about changes in both the environment and within ourselves.
Walking allows direct contact with our surroundings and using this multi-sensory embodied experience she explores the seen and unseen, unnoticed aspects of our environment. The displacement of objects, words, and sounds from the landscape to the gallery brings our attention to aspects of the environment around us, encouraging immersion and reconnection to our place in the world.
Rachel's recent work has taken inspiration from Nan Shepherd's seminal book 'The Living Mountain' which resonates with her practice. In the book Nan reflects on decades of walking on the Cairngorm Plateau. Her repeated walks into the mountain, with no destination allows her to be open to 'unheralded moments of revelation' as she slows down to look, listen and experience the rhythms of the landscape.
'the eye sees what it didn't before, or sees in a new way what it had already seen. So the ear, the other senses' Nan Shepherd
( with permission of the Nan Shepherd Literary Estate)