Rachael Field is a queer multi-disciplinary artist and an icon in her own right, through her art we experience essential insight into a queer cultural narrative from the deeply personal to the global. Exhibiting, performing, and being published since the mid ‘80s, by ’86 Rachael was creative director of “doo cot” a multi media performance company. Since 2006, she has returned to a solo practice focussing on painting whilst also building a strong collaborative presence in Queer activism

 

For many years Rachael was artist in residence at Bollox, Manchester’s queer institution of a club night, working interactively and deeply within the queer subculture of the city, as observer, documenter and intrinsic figure within it. Work from that residency is on show here at Victoria Baths. She has recently been working on a series of “Queer Icons”, 13 of which are also on show here.

 

The perfect balance of perfect line work juxtaposed with an intentional messiness of paint is a practical metaphor for the forced reality of shared queer grief, joy, suppression and expression, which Rachael acutely observes in real time. In exquisite portrayals Rachael perfectly communicates the explosive mental force of realities that have to chisse beauty out of chaos. Who live the chaos of that beauty. In her hand the experienced cultural psychosis is expressed through club kid iconography as the sad pero clown, spattering the hard frightening reality through make up and painful release. Joy and agony omnipresent as layered reality. 

 

She currently has work on show at the Smolensky Gallery in Spinning Fields and was part of Touchstones Gallery in Rochdale’s retrospective. She has an extensive resume of solo and joint exhibitions in the UK and abroad.