Visual artist Rachel Foister Follow.Art Card

About me

This body of work began in a rehearsal room, with dancers, and is resolved slowly afterwards here in the studio on Cornwall's north coast. Behind it sit years of classical training, which I draw on rather than adhere to — among other things, a method of glazed layers first developed to paint rapture. I use it for the states a dancer enters when wholly absorbed, where colour and gesture stop describing a body and begin to behave like one. Dancers are where these states come nearest the surface, which is why I keep returning to them, tracing different feelings each time.

My work begins at a threshold: the moment when movement, emotion and energy align so completely they feel transcendent. Athletes, performers and mystics go looking for that state deliberately; most of us meet it by accident, once or twice, and remember it for years.

I work with choreographers and trained dancers through a method I call symbiotic enquiry — no predetermined idea, no props. I let the unfolding movement shape my reactions, so every gesture becomes a hypothesis and every shift in energy an invitation to look again. My part is to be a resonant catalyst: to influence the work without directing it, so performance and painting evolve together.

A background in scientific research sits underneath all of this — observation, hypothesis, testing, adjustment. But an enquiry that only confirms what it expected isn't an enquiry, so I leave room for discovery I didn't plan.

What I'm following is the duality of peak performance: reflective moments where time seems suspended, and the surges of ecstasy when movement crests. Csikszentmihalyi called it flow, Diane Ackerman called it deep play. Bernini got there first, in marble, where the boundary between flesh and spirit dissolves and a body is lifted momentarily out of its own frame. Few stay at that pinnacle for long. My argument is that it isn't an illusion — that what we treat as mystical or elusive can in fact be seen, felt and shared.