Rachel Fenner ARCA

Rachel Fenner’s recent paintings and drawings of holloways, rocky coves and the last marvellous vestiges of Britain’s temperate rainforests are deeply felt responses to powerful places where wild things still survive.

Rachel is an established environmental sculptor and landscape painter. Throughout the 80s and 90s she worked prolifically making public art all around Britain. You could say that Rachel Fenner invented environmental sculpture. At the very least she was a strong and highly creative influence. At the same time she has always been well respected as a painter. Her paintings take up the English Romantic tradition of Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland and are mainly inspired by the coasts of Pembrokeshire and Dorset. Her work expresses her passion for nature, particularly the processes of growth, decay and regeneration which are so essential to life on Earth.

Four of the works in this show are inspired by the fragment of original Atlantic rainforest that survives at Ty-canol in Pembrokeshire.  When Rachel visited it was, she says, ‘intense, like a revelation. I felt surrounded by personalities who were interacting with each other. I thought, I love this place. These paintings poured out in the following weeks.’

Rachel Fenner’s paintings are in gouache on paper framed with oak or ash. We also hold stock of Rachel’s Drawings and Giclée prints. Please get in touch at email:  gallery@sladersyard.co.uk or telephone: 01308 459511 with any enquiries. We are happy to sell paintings online and ship them to you.

Born in Yorkshire, Rachel Fenner was the daughter of a watch-maker who died when she was ten years old. She used to watch him work and he would take her to earthworks in Yorkshire and around Salisbury Plain. Rachel loves maths, geometry, music and philosophy. She studied art at Wimbledon College of Art, graduating with a double first in painting and sculpture. When she got into the Royal College of Art she says it was like winning the lottery. There she found Iris Murdoch who taught her philosophy. Their correspondence continued until 1993 and is held in the archive of Kingston University.

In 1979 she won an Arts Council fellowship to work with Portsmouth City Council to develop ‘Art as Environment’ exploring the parameters of environmental art,  This project subsequently led to a large number of ground-breaking projects in which she collaborated with public bodies to produce works that were not simply integral to public spaces but were those spaces. Many of the projects were developed as ‘markers’ of former archaeological sites within the built environment.

At the same time, she continued to paint landscapes conveying dynamic energy through pattern and abstracted forms.

These paintings are so fresh that they seem almost alive.

FENELLA CRICHTON

Rachel Fenner makes paintings which make one wonder if she has just this instant invented abstraction, all by herself. Like much English abstraction, hers seems to be landscape-based. That is to say, one can suspect that one is seeing a transmogrified cornfield, branches against the moon, cracks in the ice and such, without ever being able to pin down these associations unequivocally. But what is important is that they exist, and give Fenner’s gouaches a grandly romantic, faintly melancholy quality somewhere in the same emotional area as late Paul Nash.

JOHN RUSSELL TAYLOR

The paintings … stand firmly in the tradition of modern British neo-romanticism, with their visual echoes of Paul Nash’s pastoral surrealism, or the vigorous and dramatic Welsh landscapes of Graham Sutherland. But she remains quite herself for all that.

WILLIAM PACKER

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