My name is Rachel Prior, and I am a 2D art major focusing on painting and printmaking. I am originally from North Bend, Washington, a small, rainy town with luscious vegetation and a decent outlet mall. Before coming to Whitworth, I worked as a visual merchandiser for a home decor company, as well as an intern for an interior designer. My interest and brief experience with interior design greatly impacts my work in painting and printmaking. This combined with my fascination with the complexities of emotions and the things that evoke them are what lead me to make the work that I do.
These three pieces represent a few of the different materials I have explored in combination with linocut printing. Oil paint, polyester plates, and chine colle have been implemented in the expression of various emotions through the representation of interior spaces. How Intimate, this Chopin and Honeymoon both portray a graceful poignancy, illustrating an elegant lifestyle with an inexplicable undertone of malaise. A Good Place to Be Alone uses different rooms to portray different states of comfort. Celestial dreaminess, rich, romantic warmth, and cheerful serenity are all represented through overt and even kitsch decor. This makes these moods stand out as firm retreats from the turbulence of the dark ominous sky, rocky shoreline, and rough waters surrounding the house. These internal retreats allow the harshness of the outside world to become excitingly dramatic, rather than intimidating. Each of these pieces follow my ultimate goal of expressing complex emotions through decorative spaces and surrounding environments.
