RACHEL Warren is a local mixed media artist who will be exhibiting her work at Coal Creek this August. Titled Finders Keepers, it is a celebration of texture, colour, and the therapeutic act of gathering and arranging.
Rachel is inspired to create from ordinary objects and is particularly drawn to colours, textures and the placement and shape of objects.
“I’ll just see colours, shapes, textures, and something nostalgic, something that means something to me, and I don’t know why, but it just excites me, and I’m inspired by it, and I want to make something with it.”
One such work in the exhibition features a piece of twine that lay on a road on her farm.
“I really loved the colour pink on the dirt road, and I kept driving over it and over it, and I’m thinking, I really want to do some collages of this pink twine on this brown background.”
Seeing and thinking through a creative lens inspires in Rachel the most unusual of ideas, and transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary.
An idea can be sparked by a collection of something, like toothbrushes or little toy cars, or a pun or play on words – such as ‘a brush with death’, which, Rachel said, will see a toothbrush end up in a coffin-like box.
“I’ll just be in my house and I’ll think, God, I’ve got a few of these, and then I’ll start thinking, I might do some art with it.
“Sometimes I have to tell people, can you please stop posting new toothbrushes. I’ve ended that exhibition.”
Rachel’s love of collage and assemblage began when she was a teenager, and more recently, she has been experimenting with assemblage photography, all of which will form part of the upcoming exhibition.
“The assembly photography started on a trip to Bali, where I started collecting things on the beach, and I couldn’t bring them back, so I started just playing around and assembling the things that I found and photographing what I’d make on the sand.”
“It was what washed up on the day, so they’re like little, I suppose, time capsules of the day. There’d be old thongs or bits of broken tiles or just different textures of wood.”
This sense of discovery, connection and creation is a theme that runs strongly through Rachel’s life and work, and none more so than this year, which she has dedicated solely to her art – her therapy – as she also calls it.
“I feel like I’m back at uni', where I can just keep working on something and not have to pack it up. It’s fantastic, because I just used to think, well, I’ve got to stop this. I’ve constantly had to stop things.
So, I can just continue in that flow of working, of creating. I don’t have to stop the creative flow, which is lovely. It’s making me very happy, for sure. I’m absolutely loving this year.”
The Finders Keepers exhibition is about collecting and finding beauty in everyday things, and Rachel is hopeful that viewers will find the works interesting and joyful, even nostalgic, and connect to one bit or another.
“You can kind of stare into them because they’re very layered. They’re little sort of time capsules of found things, washed-up things, things that are held on to. They’re all capsules, so you can look into them, and I hope that they feel some sort of memory or nostalgia or connection in that way,” explained Rachel.
“It’s playful, I’d like people to smile. My art is not polished or about perfection, but more about discovery, connection and creating your own story.”
The Finders Keepers exhibition opens tonight, Friday August 1, at 6pm - 8pm.
