Rachel Wolfson Smith is a mother, daughter, wife, and woman, and these roles are at once nourishing, complex, and challenging. Using herself as a model, she explores emotional landscapes under the guise of drawn landscapes.
Her drawings take cues from nature and instances of non-verbal communication throughout time—the gesture of a woman’s hand in a centuries-old portrait, a rebel plant pushing through the sidewalk, a pause in a film—and look at the dialogue between what is said and what is shown. The resulting artworks blend cycles of beauty, overwhelm, collapse, and lightness together into atmospheric landscapes that mirror the emotional or mental states that she accesses during the drawing process. Listening to books, music, and podcasts while drawing and jotting notes onto the paper further connect me with the inner experiences of others and herself. Partially legible words remain visible among the leaves in the finished drawings, offering glimpses into these worlds. Accumulations of pencil marks become archives of labor and care, and the heavy handed erasures are physical reminders to let go to make space for the future.
Guided by nature, Smith’s practice reconnects her with the nature within us all. The act of drawing is how she processes being a modern woman. The drawings are artifacts of this ongoing evolution.