The Light off Twillingate

RACHEL MACFARLANE, b. 1986

At the core of Rachel MacFarlane’s richly jeweled-toned works is a lament for the loss of places, especially landscapes, and the process of manufacturing new ones through painting. Informed by texts on the relationship between place and memory, such as Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and Frances Yates’ Art of Memory, MacFarlane foregoes empirical representations of landscapes to create fantastical ones filtered through memory. Though her works are based on specific sites, MacFarlane builds shallow box models out of paper to distill the memory of a place into an object before transforming it into a painting. These paper maquettes serve as the provisional, observational foundation for her works. Influenced by a wide variety of sources, including early Renaissance painters, the metaphysical works of Giorgio Morandi, abstractions by Thomas Nozkowski and Agnes Martin, as well as Canadian landscape painters like Doris McCarthy and Patterson Ewen, MacFarlane investigates the psychological nuances of illusionistic space.

Source: Hollis Taggert