Rachael Reeves
Rachael’s recent work is taken from her immediate environment. She lives very near the sea in Newlyn and is a regular year-round sea swimmer. Her relationship to the natural world and the places she visits on a daily basis feature regularly in her paintings. Her work also stems from an interest in the formal qualities that make up a painting; she thinks very carefully about the placement of these. Her visual language hones in on shape and form, light and dark, the edges of things.
She has recently become very interested at the point when figuration becomes abstraction and visa versa and some of her images attempt at depicting this relationship. Alongside this there is also a fascination in her experience of looking and viewing a space. Some of her current paintings capture the overlaying of images, like a visual sound scape; foreground, sky, background, details etc all coming together in one image that tries to capture a number of viewpoints, rather than from one scene or line of site, but from a number of ‘lookings’. A dear friend pointed out to her recently that ‘one of the most difficult things it seems you want to do is to make sense of the fractured nature of your individual experience and somehow to make a visual resolution’. Rachael agrees that this really does sum up her preoccupation perfectly.