I use painting to investigate the female body as a site where ideals of beauty, abjection and transformation converge. I am drawn to thresholds where categories become unstable and binaries dissolve.
Influenced by Bracha Ettinger's concept of the matrixial borderspace, I think through relationships of shared vulnerability, encounter and co-emergence rather than fixed oppositions. Biological and cosmetic forms of bodily transformation become points of connection through which I explore identity, vulnerability, mortality, and becoming.
Fragmented female figures, umbilical cords, placentas, webs, skeletal forms, cosmetic interventions, and animal bodies emerge and dissolve through successive layers of paint. These images present bodies as processes of continual transformation rather than fixed identities. By placing biological processes alongside cosmetic intervention, I question how contemporary culture constructs, disciplines, and continually remakes the female body. Animals recur throughout the work, collapsing distinctions between the human and the animal. They reflect mortality, instinct, and our impulse to impose hierarchies on bodies and nature. Among them, the spider recurs as a figure of maternal connection, protection, fragility, and interdependence.
Painting enables me to think through ambiguity and embodied experience without reducing them to fixed hierarchies of representation. I approach the studio as a relational space where images emerge through dialogue with materials rather than predetermined outcomes.
Made on the floor and beginning with charcoal drawing, each canvas is treated as a non-linear field rather than a fixed image plane. Graffiti, dripping, monoprint, scribbling, and gestural marks accumulate in layers, producing a carnivalesque visual field in which bodies, identities, and species remain in flux. The canvas becomes skin; marks act as both trace and transgression, inscribing surfaces much as bodies are marked by time, experience, and cultural expectation. Through repeated editing, erasure, and re-marking, each painting arrives at its final form.
Through painting, I explore shifting relationships between bodies, images, and identities, proposing the grotesque as a site of connection, agency, and becoming.
Rachel Mortby lives and works in London. After studying Fashion (BA) at Middlesex University, Rachel worked in film, theatre, TV and other areas of the creative industry primarily as a costume designer, supervisor and maker. She is currently enrolled on the MA in Fine Art at City and Guilds London Art School, graduating in September 2026.
Contact
Rachel.mortby@hotmail.com
Exhibitions
June 26: "A small works show", Acme Studios
Mar 26: City & Guilds Art School interim show
Feb 26: Together Through Art, Mall Galleries London
Jul 25: "How the light gets in", Marylebone Gallery
Mar 25: City & Guilds Art School interim show
Mov-Mar 25: Beep Painting Biennale, Elysium gallery
Jul 24: The Essential School of Painting graduation show
Jul 23: The Essential School of Painting interim show
May 23: Artists Open House Dulwich
May 22: Dulwich Art Group, Artists Open House Dulwich
Aug 21 - Dec 24: Great Bow Wharf Gallery, Langport Somerset
Nov 21 - Nov 22: Jane Newbery Gallery, Dulwich