Finding the Light in the work of Rachel Garrard
by Jazia Hammoudi
Art Report
March 3, 2016
We caught up with the multi-media artist Rachel Garrard at the opening of her solo exhibition Hidden Light at Tanja Grunert’s new space in Chelsea. The exhibition was curated by Mitra
Khorasheh and includes works by the artist that explore space and light through unusual materials like stone, ash, and smoke. Garrard uses these materials in a performative painting practice in which the shapes on the canvas reflect the geometry of her own body. Through a reduction of elements—wood to ash, stone to powder, fire to smoke—Garrard performs a distillation of her particular human form to create a kind of spiritual geometry of light. What results are paintings that are both earthly and ethereal, tied to the specificity of their creation but also speaking to movement and change, as light travels across surface.