Soft Centres

Paper fragments on fine art paper, 105 x 75cm, 2024
Prints here

​​Soft Centres continues Rachel Walker’s intuitive, process-driven exploration of formal concerns focusing on creating large compositions from small fragments. Rachel tears and pastes tiny fragments of paper from magazines to make large gestural collages, which evoke emotion through their non-representational nature. 

Recently, they have expanded their practice to include paint and textiles with the same intent. Approaching different mediums with similar ideas expands the possibility of each idea and forms a feedback loop, becoming a kind of world-making.

The term "polycentric" has come up in Rachel’s visual process journals. She’s rolling with it because she feels it aptly describes the decentralised nature of her work, which avoids a singular focal point and instead explores the relationships between multiple elements. Rachel sees polycentricity as a way to convey feeling, rather than depicting a subject. It also reflects the balance and composition in their work, where the centre is left empty.

A quick google search has shown that "polycentricity" does not yet have a broader cultural meaning, but she feels it holds potential, particularly in the context of contemporary life, where many people are less rooted and more fragmented in their experiences and more importantly, notions of the centre and the periphery need to be questioned.

Prints here