Change

Rachael Burnett grew up in York, in a context where art wasn’t really discussed or experienced.  However, it was clear to people around her that she had very strong visual reactions to places, people and objects.  At the age of four her local GP, Dr Morris, gave Burnett’s mother a block of clay and told her to encourage her artistic pursuits.  ‘She will be an artist.'  In 2020, Burnett discovered that the same Dr Morris encouraged David Hockney to be an artist too.

Burnett studied Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art and graduated with a First Class degree.   She was lined up to start a fully funded PhD in Fine Art under the supervision of Professor Karen Forbes and Professor Elizabeth Cowling on Marcel Duchamp’s ‘The Large Glass.’  

‘I was all set to go. Everything was in place.’ Burnett remembers. ‘The security, the status and the sense of having a clear context and community to work within was so tempting.  A PhD was something I could talk about.  It sounded impressive.  It would give me a structure to follow for the next few years.  It would give me validation.’

In the summer before starting the research, she travelled on her own to the small island of Nantucket for three months.  ‘Deep down, I knew I wanted to paint.  To get a studio and make work.  It was simultaneously the hardest and easiest decision I have ever made.’  Burnett pulled out of the PhD and got part-time jobs from life modelling to art tutoring and rented a tiny studio in Edinburgh.

Burnett went onto win various awards, including the ‘James Cumin Award for Draughtsmanship’ and the ‘Latimer Award for meritorious work by a young Artist’ at The Royal Scottish Academy.

Burnett has exhibited paintings and drawings in galleries across London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Yorkshire.  Her work is an exploration of beauty, impermanence and uncertainty.  Burnett is interested in why she finds certain visual themes meaningful.  ‘Plato thinks we find things beautiful because we recognise qualities in the object that we ourselves desire or need.  I really like this idea.  My process starts with attraction.  I find something fascinating, meaningful or compelling.  I then explore it through drawing, painting and re-painting.  I let all the feelings, thoughts and ideas I seem to be processing in my own life take form in a wordless poem.  There is a strong relationship between the interior and exterior worlds in my work.’  

The Guardian journalist and author Oliver Burkeman observes the connection between the psychological and physical in his reflections about her series No Room For Certainty, which explores a chandelier Burnett discovered in a second-hand shop in New York and an earlier encounter with lanterns in St Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai in Egypt.  Burkeman writes:  ‘The influence of these experiences is always present in the paintings of No Room For Certainty, which achieve a state of movement and disorder fraught with hesitation and indecision, conveying the precarious relationship between the rich surface of an ageing chandelier and its imminent collapse into dust.  And like the lanterns of St Catherine’s – so numerous that they seemed themselves to be worshippers, leaving little space for people – the objects in Burnett’s paintings often serve to embody human states of mind.’

According to Burnett, ‘playing at the threshold between order and chaos through painting, helps me live with the vulnerabilities, imperfections and transitions of life.  I have tried not painting.  Many times.  I perennially think about a more secure and sensible way to live.  It doesn’t work.  Something inside me always rebels – the psyche, the soul or whatever! It wakes me up in the night, literally. I am convinced I need to take some life-saving medicine.  I can’t work out whether I am dreaming or not.  I have come to believe that this is my truest self, reminding me to paint.  So I paint.’

Contact Rachael Burnett:  rachaelaburnett@gmail.com