_edited.png)
_edited.png)
Rachael's Art Portfolio
Delicate lines and curves carved to tell a tale
My practice explores memory through domestic space, using fragments of my nanny’s home to examine how identity, texture, and pattern shape our sense of belonging. Through drawing, printmaking, and material exploration, I reconstruct intimate interiors as layered emotional maps of the past. My portfolio reflects an ongoing dialogue between my studio practice and my work as an art educator. Themes of memory, texture, fragmentation, and close observation appear across both. In the studio, I deconstruct domestic spaces to explore how meaning is built through material and perception. In the classroom, I apply this same approach, encouraging students to question the familiar, experiment with materials, and use sensory and reflective processes to develop personal and critical responses. Each body of work informs how I teach, and each teaching experience reshapes how I think as an artist.
Artwork Gallery
Discover Rachael's Art
Explore a diverse range of Rachael's artwork, from bold, blocky prints on wallpaper and oilcloth to stitched design in lace curtains followed by intricate laser cut drawings on wallpaper. Each collection embodies a unique blend of creativity and emotion, capturing the essence of Rachael's artistic exploration and delving into the depths of her nanny's house.
Block Print's
Printed memories
My block printing practice explores memory and domestic space, using my nanny’s home, particularly her kitchen, as a site of warmth, repetition, and generational connection. Through bold, physical mark-making and layered printing, I translate everyday objects, worn surfaces, and rituals into block interior fragments that suggest both presence and absence. By printing onto materials closely associated with domestic life, including acrylic, oilcloth, wallpaper, and paper, memory becomes a layered surface where texture, pattern, and material carry emotional weight. Block printing acts as a starting point in my practice, allowing me to break memory into fragments and rebuild it through repetition, surface, and touch.
Drawings
Detailed Illustrations
My drawings focus on familiar domestic spaces and objects taken from my nanny’s home, such as furniture, corners of rooms, and architectural details. I break these spaces apart and redraw them from different angles, isolating elements that are often overlooked. Through clean line work and careful observation, the drawings act as fragments of memory rather than complete scenes. By rearranging and flattening these interior views, I explore how memory is experienced in pieces — shifting, partial, and shaped by repetition and time.
Laser cut drawing's
Elegance in Detail
Laser cutting allows me to physically dissect my drawings of my nanny’s home, echoing how memory is held in fragments rather than complete spaces. By cutting into patterns, architectural details, and domestic surfaces, I remove parts of the image and create gaps that reflect what is remembered, overlooked, or lost over time. This process mirrors the way I revisit the past — through sections, surfaces, and feelings instead of whole rooms. The cut lines break familiar interiors apart and allow them to be rebuilt in new ways, changing how these spaces are understood. Pattern plays an important role, as repeated motifs become traces of identity, taste, and class. It turns the domestic interior into a layered, emotional space rather than a fixed place.
Mixed media
Exploring Creativity
My mixed media work allows materials to carry memory directly, rather than simply supporting an image. I paint onto fabric and allow parts of the textile to remain visible, letting pattern, and wear become part of the image itself. In other works, I use embroidery to respond to change and loss within familiar spaces, such as the Lace curtains taken from my nanny’s home that are used as both surface and subject; It is divided into five embroidered sections that reference different floods in Wexford through motifs, keywords, and stitched text. The lace was ripped, torn, and dyed in stages to reflect rising flood water, embedding personal and environmental memory into the material. Through layering, stitching, and alteration, these works explore how domestic materials hold traces of resilience, disruption, and lived experience.