Rachel
Pearcey

My work is about drawing and repetition, and stitching. I make marks – small, often tiny, rarely big, marks.  I start with a very simple theme and explore the ways it can be changed, moved on, adapted but without straying from the ‘first principles’ of short straight marks. For some years now I have been working with stitch, hand or machine,  often reworking earlier pen and ink drawings. Stitched ‘marks’ take on a stuttering quality which becomes more apparent the closer one looks; I love this very obvious sense of the haptic in the unevenness of each mark and the intimacy which close inspection invites. And with thread my works take on a delicate 3D quality. In spite of how slow the hand stitching process is and how considered the placing of every stitch, each work moves and develops in its own way, takes on a life of its own.

I work in black and white. The correct thickness of the thread/mark is of prime importance.

The spaces created by the marks are just as important as the marks which delineate them; very much in the Japanese sense of “ma” a celebration not of ‘things’, but the spaces between them.