Rachel Ricketts rbsa

The two works In Absentia: Bees and In Absentia: Butterflies are responses to the increasing pressures on Earth’s fragile ecosystem.

The two canine studies are commissioned works.

Having practiced and refined my observational and practical skills with naturalistic works over many years I now feel justified in exploring a wider field. In recent and current territories of interest my imagination is given more freedom of expression.

The subject of speciesism has always been at the core of my personal ethos, before ever I knew it was a thing, and my aim is to have a more up-front discourse with this subject through the various media of my creative processes.

Rachel is happy to undertake commissions directly via this website.

Rachel is a self-taught sculptor with an international client base. Having originally trained as a painter, she subsequently undertook further training as a restorer of art and antiquities. Informed by an admiration for the rich diversity of life, she continually experiments with new ways of working and increasingly endeavours to use natural materials: metals, clay and earth pigments. Paints are created from scratch and natural finishes, such as gold leaf, are employed. Her sculpture ranges in size from a few centimetres to large, life-sized beast: two of the latter are in the permanent collection at Hergest Croft Gardens.

Throughout her work’s diversity of media and form, the common denominator is an invitation to empathise or engage with another species: paintings such as In Absentia, which reference the catastrophic decline and loss of species; her ceramic hybrid bird-doll figures allude to shamanic head-dresses used to conjure the unique energy of the creature represented.

Classical mythologies are often at the root of her works, though not literally interpreted. The painting Twelve Disobedient Servants is based on the biblical story of Revelations, and has been given an alternative ending.