Visual artist Rachel Nelson Follow.Art Card

About me

I am an artist and researcher currently undertaking a PhD in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, working primarily with textiles to explore the lived experience of motherhood. Using processes including needle-felting, embroidery and knitting, I am interested in aspects of maternal life that can be difficult to articulate or are often absent from familiar representations of motherhood: its intensity, strangeness, intimacy, repetition and its capacity to alter how we see ourselves and those closest to us.

My current work uses wool felted into pierced linen to create portraits that initially resemble drawings but become soft, blurred and materially unstable on closer inspection. Working from family photographs, I explore the maternal gaze and the tension between intimacy and distance, allowing familiar images to become slightly uncertain as they shift between image and object.

Alongside my own experience, my research draws on folklore, historical representations of women and contemporary culture, including the figure of the witch, to consider experiences that have traditionally been hidden, dismissed or treated as unsettling. Through slow, repetitive processes of making, I want the work to resist straightforward narratives of motherhood and instead leave space for ambiguity, contradiction and psychological complexity.