Rachael
Clarke Hendel

Thesis Abstract:

A Wayfinder is an experiential environment consisting of sculpture, painting, weaving and the viewer’s body moving through a space. I explore way finding, pathways, and methods that lead to lostness. Lost is contextually defined as a disruption of normalcy, and the longing for leaving the individual self behind. I employ landscape and the horizon as my scaffolding. Through repetitive, corporeal making, my practice and resulting work become a door, a door back to becoming lost again. Inhabiting the liminal, fallible space of language, I make the words lost, in-between, leftover, escapade, and prank fit into my own lexicon. My conceptual language is inspired by the writings of Rebecca Solnit, Robert Macfarland, Mary Ruefle and Patti Smith.

Artist Statement:

I work to create a way, a way of returning to being lost.

At the center of my practice’s orbit is the search for lostness found in the earth’s expanses: a moment where one forgets the self completely and the immersive sensory findings grant a reprieve of anonymity, privacy, and quietness.

I toy with the leftovers of experience — accumulated materials and memories act as remnants of those moments of lostness, informing the light, forms and placement of my work. An obsessive revisiting and reworking of these moments drives my time in the studio.