Rachel Folland is originally from Williams Lake B.C and is currently in her fourth year of the visual arts program at the University of Victoria. Rachel has been apart of multiple group exhibitions, one being Cognito at the Vault Gallery located in downtown Victoria which involved 13 video artists with dueling projectors and sound. She has also exhibited her work in two additional group exhibitions at the Audain gallery in Victoria, Lucky Thirteen which featured thirteen artists displaying different forms of drawing and Spillways which consisted of many artists’ working in a variety of mediums. Additionally, she has shown work at the Mezzanine in the Visual Arts Building at UVic as part of a group exhibition called Shaped by Dusk. She has also had her work shown in the UVSS Gender Empowerment Center journal at UVic. For the past three summers Rachel has participated in themed open call exhibitions held at the Station House Gallery and Giftshop located in Williams Lake and this past summer she was apart of the downtown Williams Lake art walk where she exhibited her work at a local business.
Through the mediums of 2D/3D animation, digital illustration, watercolour and oil pastels Rachel blends reality and fantasy by twisting the natural worlds landscape into something strange and other worldly. The playful narratives and fantastical characters and landscapes that Rachel illustrates throughout her work are intertwined as most of them are set in a fantasy world that she has been continuously building. Initially when she began to create this world, she started to build it though the characters, but she has now begun to shift her approach to the world building, and she has instead started to build this world through a lens of what the lands ecology and ecosystems would look like. Rachel takes a lot of her inspiration from the fantasy genre and similarly to the genre she looks at nature through the lens of romanticism where she tends to depict nature as a living organism with its own agency. A difference within her work in comparison to the genre where nature and modernity are often depicted as completely separate or as clashing where one dominates the other, she instead aims to create environments and narratives where nature and fantasy, modernity and reality co-exist. Rachel shows this in her work not only through using technology to illustrate nature in a fantastical form but also through exploration which is a key theme throughout her artwork specifically playful exploration whether that is through the narratives and the characters or through her interactive works both of which explore the land in a playful and fun way.
