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.