Artist STatement

Rachel Burke is a multidisciplinary artist and designer based in Meanjin/Brisbane, Australia.  Burke’s process driven, performative work moves between wearable art, sculpture, contemporary painting, and installation to navigate themes of identity, memory, and obsession. Her practice re-imagines the mundanity of the everyday through ornamentation and transformation of the ordinary. Using nostalgic, colourful materials centred in craft and play, these artworks serve as ‘portals’ for personal introspection and transcendence, highlighting the complicated tenderness and frailty of memory. 

Burke mobilises abstraction alongside repetitious mark-making to manifest emotions in whimsical mixed media works. Tactile paintings, swathed in glitter, beads and sugary pastel colours, often sit alongside hand crafted pompoms, and fanciful garments adorned with multi-coloured tinsel.

Burke aims to inject magic into normality with saturated colour and dense laborious decoration, obsessively grappling with, and reaching for, the bittersweetness of nostalgia for youth in adulthood. Together, these works make the imaginary visible, bringing physicality to the nonsensical nature of dreams and our imagination. 

Rachel has exhibited her work in gallery spaces across Australia, recent solo exhibitions include: Garden of Gratitude, Brisbane Powerhouse, (2021), Apomowish, Hawthorn Arts Centre, (2021), Cute Tomb, Saint Cloche Gallery (2020), APOMOGY, Redlands Art Gallery (2019), The Little Mermaid, Hamer Hall (2019), Tinsel Town, Analogue Gallery (2017), The Magical Mundane, Fortitude Valley Mall (2016), APOMOGY, Enough Space (2016). Recent group exhibitions include: City in the Sun, The Museum of Brisbane (2021-2022), The F Word, The Print Bar (2019), Wonderwall, Adderton Gallery (2019), Wonderland, The Australian Centre of the Moving image (2018), Yen Female Art Awards, GAFFA (2016).