Copyright Rachel Gadsden 2001-2007. No images or material on this site may be used or reproduced in any format without prior written permission from Rachel Gadsden.

Quotes: Critical reviews

Colin Hambrook editor of DAO (Disability Arts Online) commissioned Rachel to write an article about her art work and her exploration of North Wales Hospital. The following article was published online in October 2005

http://www.disabilityarts.com/depth/rachel-gadsden/

BBC article for Beyond the Asylum Exhibition at Denbigh Museum and Library Sept - October 2005

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_east/4209506.stm

Colin Hambrook in his ezine for DAO:

http://www.dada-south.org.uk/news.php

Inside Out Architecture week 2005, Rachel Gadsden & Dylan Trigg – Poetics of Decay

Felicity Harvest, Executive Director of Arts Council England, South East commenting on the Inside Out project:

"The Arts Council is delighted to be working with such an exceptional group of artists on this imaginative and innovative project. We believe it has the potential to change profoundly the way those who experience it think about the built environment."

Fiona and Cathy Hutson: Hutson Gallery Nov 2003:
"Rachel is a narrative painter. Her sensitivity to the human spirit is immense. Her landscapes and figures are full of raging vitality. The physical application of paints, glues, glass and earths reflects the energy of the subjects. Her small group of work in our inaugural exhibition was widely appreciated and discussed and this new collection should give her the recognition she deserves."

“Whispers in the Dust” Institute of Child Health, Wellcome Trust Building, May 2001

Introduction by Julian Bell, artist and author of What is Painting, 1998, art critic and reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, Modern Painters and The Guardian:

"Rachel Gadsden’s paintings get under your skin. That’s not a comfortable feeling: the blurts and leaks and clots of her handiwork are all too reminiscent of body processes over which we keep only a precarious adult control. Likewise the butcher’s-block palette, with its fatty yellows and liverish purples, undermines any feelings of aesthetic detachment; it’s as if you’re being turned inside out, dragged through your own viscera. And yet this is art, the work of a considered and skilled intelligence, and as you attune to it, its complexities of hue and marking emerge as rich and lyrical.

The attack of Gadsden’s work comes from its ambition. In common with many emerging artists, she is looking for new kinds of depth in painting, for fresh ways that it could symbolize shared truths. She finds such elements - the tug of system against flux, of selfhood against mortality - in her close (both practical and personal) experience of medicine.

Drawing on the examples of post-war Parisian pioneers like Wols and Fautrier, but also touched by the comic-sad tone of 1990s abjection, this is anatomical art for a new age: not so much an analysis, as an analogue of the stuff beneath our skins."