About Rachael:

RACHAEL GARLAND

Born in the Manawatu in 1971 Rachael was somewhat a late starter in the world of art.  Having worked in an array of jobs from administration through to the field of Transfusion Medicine, it was almost by accident she ended up in Art School at the beginning of 2000.  Facing redundancy in late 1999 when Palmerston North hospital was undergoing restructuring she sent off a somewhat panicked and almost flippant last-minute application to the Quay School of Arts in Wanganui.  By January 2000 she had sold up and moved from Palmerston North to Wanganui where she still lives with her partner Johnny and 9 year old son Ed.
At the Quay School of Arts the first choice of majoring in Ceramics became unavailable in her second year, so she reluctantly changed to a major in Printmaking.  The reluctance did not last for very long when she discovered the magic of a printing press and went on to graduate at the top of the class in 2003 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with High Distinction.  In her third year at art school she and a fellow printmaker and friend Vanessa Edwards rented an old abandoned two-storied Chinese Laundry in the heart of Wanganui’s Old Town district and set up Cherry Cherry Studio.
Since graduating she works almost full-time from Cherry Cherry Studio doing both painting and printmaking and also works part time at the Sarjeant Gallery in Wanganui.  In between the studio and the Sarjeant Gallery time is spent juggling the day to day requirements of life as a Mum (with accompanying loads of washing and tactical dodging of stray lego).  The best advice she received at art school was “work with what you know” and this has inevitably become a pivotal point in her prints and paintings.  As a woman artist she often feels divided between her studio practice and the demands of the domestic realm and thus these themes often trickle into her images.  That, along with what she describes as an “extremely cynical (yet humorous) awareness of the irony of life” is often the driving force behind the finished product.