Rachel Bacon received her BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and MA Drawing from the University of the Arts London (2016). Originally from New York City, she is currently based in The Hague, NL, where she teaches drawing at the KABK, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and was a member of the grant committee at Stroom Den Haag. Rachel has often been an artist-inresidence, most recently at MASS MoCA (2018), Banff Centre for the Arts (2017), and with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Rachel has exhibited her work at both national and international venues, including: De Cacaofabriek, Helmond NL; galerie-b2, Leipzig DE; Jerwood Drawing Prize, London; MALLONY Arts Festival, Lithuania; Amsterdam Drawing Fair and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NYC. She has realized a number of public art commissions in the Netherlands and in New York City, among others for the Trust for Public Land and the Palace of Justice in The Hague.

My recent work is an ongoing series of drawings called Emotional Landscape. I am interested in exploring how we see and construct landscape through the frame of our own emotional make-up, and in generating a dialogue on how both personal and social history may become folded into distinct landscapes over time. These drawings are based on crumpled paper, and explore the discovery of value within something already damaged. This value seems to lie within the creative act, even if that starts with a failure, something crumpled up and ready to be thrown away. The drawings took an extraordinary amount of time to make, slowing down time in the process and accruing in value by the sheer number of hours involved in their making. The incorporation of grids and other lines led me to an exploration of the fold, allowing the drawings to expand into the surrounding space. In a state of transition between a diagrammatic and a topographical surface, the drawings are simultaneously both map and landscape. The folded drawings are ultimately not just a physical intervention in space, but potentially act as a conceptual strategy for incorporating different viewpoints into a composite field, further interrupting any hierarchies of value.