Biography

Rachel Barlow (b. 2001) is an artist from Cambridge, UK, currently living and working in London. Her practice uses landscape as a medium for remembrance, feeling, and belonging, taking inspiration from the geographies of southern Siberia where her family is from. Her current line of research is on the Yukaghir, a Siberian ethnic group, exploring their relationship to land and landscape.

 

To Rachel, painting is a method of dislocation in which real places affected by human destruction and natural disaster can be transformed into semi-fictional narratives. With a background in English literature, she sees abstraction as a kind of 'language-making', allowing her to intentionally communicate or miscommunicate specific logics in order to blur the boundaries between the real and the imagined.

 

Rachel's approach aims to balance the spontaneous and intentional, allowing the painting to express itself organically. As the artist, she becomes an agent in the work's creation, and is transformed by its influence. The final piece therefore acts as an active material archive, a story of its own creation, changing in relation to the perception of each individual viewer.

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