Rachel Smith United Kingdom

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Originally from Essex I have lived in The North East since 2008 with my daughter who has physical disabilities and emotional issues. I originally did a degree in textiles at Wolverhampton University in the 1990's but studied for an MA in Fine Art in 2020 at Teesside University. I am inspired by the environment around me and the people in it. Exploring mental health, distortions and perceptions.

My work work is about escape. I like to use photography and painting to express that desire. It is easy to be swept away with the needs and worlds of others. When you have a child, especially one with physical and emotional needs and elderly parents who can dominate your time, you can lose the idea of who you are and what your place in the world is. More and more I feel the need to explore my place, what it is and how can I use it to build my life beyond the needs of others and how can I support my mental health? Also to look at others and what methods they may use to establish their own space and to escape their own struggles. I became fascinated with the idea that everyone sees the world in a different way. We all look at a view as a whole. Taking a series of images in our mind and putting them together in our own way. We emphasise the things important to us and ignore the things that aren’t.

I like to walk and explore my environment, seeing how it can affect my feelings and mood, psychogeography. I will record this through photography, photomontage and blogging. How I see everything and the things that stand out as important within that environment to me would be very different to someone else. I often display the photomontages of a view as I love the distortion they create. Like the distortion in my head. (Recently I have started to add WhatThreeWords to each view so, in theory, anyone can go to that point and create their own photomontage of the same view.)

My paintings will also come from these walks and photos. Often featuring trees and people, they are about finding that happiness and calmness which helps me deal with my everyday life. From this I have started to look at others and how they deal with the struggles in their life. I use a variety of media from oils and acrylics to Egg tempera and collage.