Rachel Stone is a visual artist based in Sydney, Australia, having returned two years ago after living in Northern NSW and New York over the past couple of decades.
Rachel’s paintings, drawings, collages and found object sculptures have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in all of the major regional galleries of Northern NSW and are held in private collections.
A R T I S T S T A T E M E N T
My current work explores the realm of the unseen — the invisible energy or life force that underpins all living beings: plant, insect, animal, and human.
Whilst living and creating in the forest over several years, I began to perceive this energy as a calm buzzing, a clear light in the infinite blackness. It is that unnameable thing that, when one is finely attuned (say, through meditation or spending time in the wilderness), so clearly links our inner and outer worlds such that the two become mirror-lake reflections of each other.
‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, as Dylan Thomas so eloquently put it, exists beyond the shifting seas of melancholy and joy. It is a timeless spark that is beyond the physical realm yet also the very essence of it.
Elementals is my currently evolving series of coloured pencil drawings on watercolour paper. Earthly things like stones, velvety moth wings, iridescent insects, raindrops and crescent moons intermingle with abstract shapes, hinting at the unknowable magnificence of which we can only hope to catch tantalising glimpses.
Working in a spontaneous manner, some of the imagery that emerges reminds me of sixties-style hallucinatory visions of the cosmos bursting forth with a humming and humorous vitality… an innocent psychedelic period on Earth, when all the world was born afresh.
In all of my work, inspiration comes largely from nature … cloudscapes, the play of light on water, the quiet splendour of plants, the bizarre wonders of the animal world, the sounds of frogs, cicadas, raucous native birds, swirling creeks and lapping seawater.
These works on paper are particularly inspired by a stunning collection of tribal and sacred art that I photographed and catalogued for an art collector. The forms and colours in my drawings respond to the soulful aesthetics found in early Aboriginal bark paintings; tribal masks and statuettes from Africa, Nepal and Japan; wooden shields and ceremonial bowls from Oceania; Hindu deities; Tibetan carved crystals; shamans’ talismans; and hundreds of other ritual objects from all over the world. I fell in love with the natural materials used, such as hand-carved wood, Mother of Pearl, feathers, ebony, bark, natural ochre pigments, and dried grasses.