Flight of the BirdMen

The Works of Rachel Williams

Rachel Williams: Statue Birdman in the Blue

My practice is an exploration—always. I don't feel any particular need to continue down one path for years and years. I feel the need always to be making new work, breaking new ground, making something interesting to me, that is exciting to me, that fulfils my need to create things with faith, that everything feeds into everything else.

New Zealand-born Rachel William works across several disciplines, from oil on canvas and wood panel to paper and plastic. From her first love— printmaking—comes the need to make the transferred marks which permeate her work. The similarity and difference theme provides much background to her practice. Perceptions of sameness, repetition, and subtleties of difference perceived or actual pepper her output. Rachel rarely uses a brush but instead prefers to scrape and imprint the paint onto the surface using a variety of often mundane objects such as cardboard, acetate, cloth and bubble wrap.

She is open to all printing forms but is particularly drawn to mono-printing. Mono means 'one', a printing process that only produces one piece. Rachel naturally favours original printing techniques and is interested in capturing a spark in the moment of inspiration.

Her recent collection explores the notion of museums and how a museum would move an object from one place to another, therefore containing and displaying the artefacts of the world. The museum concept is like her printmaking process. She calls this Transference, whereby she uses many materials and objects to create her marks and imagery.

Rachel Williams: Grave Goods II

Other themes she has been working on are endangered animals' connection with museums and archaeology, which is a natural progression. It feeds back into her interest in the mark-making of cave paintings and a fascination with the combination of human and animal, whether a BirdMan or Cynocephalus.

Rachel is obsessed with creating BirdMen. The bird symbolism that is perhaps associated with freedom the Egyptians symbolised as Ba, the bird that appears as a physical soul symbolising rebirth, equates roughly to our idea of personality and is often shown as a bird whose duty was to feed the deceased.

She is strongly linked with archaeology, ancient culture and grave goods. She is connecting to how we live and the proximity to the now. We still have talismen and superstitions. And many moments of everyday life are not that different now from times gone by. There is a sense of the afterlife and the laying of time in Rachel's art, which is also captured in her printmaking processes.

It is inspiring to witness that her art never stops still, just like the artist herself.

Rachel Williams: Birdman I