Rachel Barlow

About

The natural world is a place of dichotomy. It sustains destruction and beauty, brutality and otherworldly magic, grief and memory. My painting practice aims to provide a space for viewers to sit with this duality and indulge in the complexities of nature.

My paintings often emerge from a focus on specific geographical sites, particularly places where my family members from Siberia, Germany, and England have lived or died. However, I do not restrain myself to what we consider the ‘real’ or ‘imagined’, and frequently construct fictional landscapes based on simple interactions of form: the branches of a tree in the park, shadows on the pavement, or the pattern of cobwebs. Inspired particularly by German Expressionism, the Russian avant-garde, and 1910s British textile art, I prioritise the independence of the painted landscape as a ‘place’ and ‘space’ in its own right.

As such, the process of painting itself is vitally important. The act of painting allows me to reflect on my intention with the work and immerse myself into the landscape I am creating, often in quite a playful way. As I paint, the colours seem to select themselves from my palette as my brush sweeps across the canvas. The combination of colour and form independently ‘decide[s] the composition of the whole’ (Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art). I become an agent in the work’s creation, transformed by its influence. In this way, the experimental and spontaneous nature of my process allows the final painting to act as a material archive — a story of its own creation.