Soon after graduating from Brighton Poly (Fine Art, Painting) in 1986, Rachael Adams expanded her practice to include typography, photography and in the early 1990’s, the use of graphic digital media. She has also incorporated sound and film.

The subject matter of her work focuses on social, class and personal labyrinths; conventions we’re conditioned to inhabit. She is specifically interested in judgemental responses to private and domestic trauma and shame. She describes and interprets social taboos, often media-led, but propagated by us all, creating social disadvantage for its tarnished victims, or social ‘runts’.

The exposure of personal vulnerability, sniffed out by an alert populace hungry to bully and victimise, highlights the ‘Dunning-Kruger Effect’. She considers the absurdity and emotional cost of smear-campaigns. Work highlights specific moments based on memory, or visualisation of situations, sometimes held in little more than an expression, which have been constructed as staged settings in which events are symbolised. As her work develops, she begins to clarify what has puzzled her. Narrative emerges through chance and juxtaposition.

Rachael Adams was born in 1965.

New Artists: Absolute Beginners

Stuart Morgan, 1986 (ISBN 0904167232)

Outside In: When Rachael Adams calls her own work ‘epic landscape’ she seems to be enjoying her favourite joke; there is nothing obviously grandiose about her small drawings on paper. Yet paradoxically her aim is to suggest giant forces and vast space in the simplest possible way. An impatient draughtsman – at one stage she was making two-minute studies – she finds it easier to depict subtle changes of weather and light by limiting herself to a few devices: the boundary of a field, a line of trees… But economy of means does not necessarily lead to economy of effect, Perhaps ‘epic landscape’ is not a joke after all.