Click through to explore Rachel’s art collections:

At 15 years old, Rachel was told by her high school art teacher that art could actually be a career. This was the greatest news of her life.

From that moment on, Rachel dedicated herself to gaining entry to the Dunedin School of Art, New Zealand, to study for a Bachelor of Fine Arts.

Rachel graduated in 2005 with a BFA majoring in Photography. Along the way she toyed with the idea of becoming a sculptor, and really loved painting too, but it was photography that captured her heart and mind, and after graduating, she set up her own photography business in Dunedin, NZ in 2006.

All her work at art school was based on common themes that kept emerging. Finding meaning in suffering, forging identity, and seeing beauty in brokenness. Her muses were not so much other artists, but writers and thinkers, like Viktor Frankl, Kahlil Gibran, Paulo Coelho and Carl Jung.

Rachel always wanted her work to be about more than the thing pictured. She loves metaphor, concepts, and relishes in making words and ideas visual.  It is rather incredible now, as she works with health professionals, teachers, and businesses about effective communication, how much her Fine Art background is helping make strategic concepts, models and systems come alive visually.

Rachel has achieved highly with her photography and was awarded the NZIPP Wedding Photographer of the Year 2011, awarded NZIPP Master status in 2014 and has won numerous awards in New Zealand and Australia for her photography. As well as being featured in art exhibitions and gallery spaces, she is invited regularly to judge both the NZIPP and Australian Institute of Professional Photography annual photography awards, and in 2019 received the Ian Poole Memorial award for best judge. 

Rachel now lives and creates on Whadjuk Boodjar of the Noongar Nation (Perth, Western Australia). The colours and textures inspire and invite curiosity and deeper connection to culture, history and finding a place within the context of reconciliation and continued stewardship of the land.

The last five years has seen Rachel explore the intrigue of fractals, and the lessons of impermanence. Through her signature medium of creating temporary canvases from frozen water, the ice sheets are then painted on using mixed media including paint that Rachel has created from making pigment from the places she visits on Whadjuk Boodjar and wider Western Australian surroundings. She then photographs the ice canvas as it melts, shifts and the pigments flow and settle. The textures and tones mimic those of the country she calls home. Weather patterns form, dendritic shapes crystallise, salt lake features emerge in the temporary and fleeting moments of each paintings’ existence.

She is a member of the WA Lapidary and Rock Hunting Club and she has learned to cut, polish, identify and extract pigment from the abundant rocks and minerals found here in Western Australia and beyond.

Her works are unique in form, tone and hue, and while the original ‘painting’ melts and washes away, the final product is a large scale photographic invitation into a miniature landscape that no longer exists.