Rachel Busby

About 

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It followed unknowingly at first, but the primary source of my practice is my own experience in the world. It's an autobiographical account of my temporal emotions adjusting to time, memory and change.  

 

I paint probing for encounters, insisting never to fully plan in advance. It is the incidentals, mistakes and the unexpected that are key to my work. This dissonant lexicon is where it feels more similar to the living world. 

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Recently I have been displacing and re-imagining my previous paintings through collage. They were considered finished at the time.  It was easy deciding to create further upheavals in my practice. My father-in-law was diagnosed with brain cancer and I retreated inwards. It wasn’t the time for a fresh start in a new series of works as now, we were living in a crisis.
 
My practice was in emergency mode, but wishing for a heuristic approach, I was keen to destroy and then re-build. The original works unravelled and rearticulated themselves into a different discourse of history.  I brought the chaos into my practice and out of this destruction I saw a nascent narrative that fitted perfectly and with future dialogues. 

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Although arbitrary, my works always lean to the biomorphic, influenced from my rural upbringing in Wales and that of Brazil. Some of my recent collages are heavily layered, emphasizing the sedimentary tides of history, time and memory.

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Since moving to Brazil a few years ago, I have been keen not to exotify it in any shape or form.  If anything, I have used this time to rediscover my identity and understand my new equilibrium here in Brazil. 

 

My recent works have been heavily influenced by The Mabinogion.

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The Mabinogion is a collection of 11 Celtic medieval stories compiled during the 12th and 13th centuries in Wales. The tales are much older than this as they were derived from oral traditions. These tales include Celtic mythologies, folklore, fantasy and a loose nod to history.  Themes touch on the supernatural otherworld and the medieval mortal world. Each story is emblematic of the balance and tensions of both worlds.

 

I like to loosely compare the mortal world as Wales, and the otherworld as Brazil. 

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As a consequence, the stories are fragmented and disjointed and not the product of a single hand, as they evolved over a span of centuries from Bard to Bard. ( Bard is the Welsh term for storyteller. ) In turn, the stories got distorted, altered and re-adapted day after day. Whereas the Irish version was well organised, documented and written at the same time, the Welsh version was not.  As tales were passed along, there were oversights and misunderstandings which contributed to the deterioration of the plots and the obfuscation of the original themes structures. 

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There is something inherently familiar about the Mabinogion construction and this,  I clearly identify with. I found solace and relief in finally understanding that through the chaos and entanglements of my own work that my Welsh heritage is based on a similar cultural system. 

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Merging time frames, distortions and reemergence. Re-articulating my work from a distinct time period, ripping it apart and assembling a new presence, the original motives, concerns and concepts still exist but now I choose to metamorphose its memory into a new displacement of time.