Hazelhurst Arts Centre, 2022

Essay extract by Jo Morrow…

For Rachel Honnery, the bodily investment in her artistic response to environmental malaise, specifically incited by the devastation of the 2019/2020 bushfires, is pronounced and personal. Totemic structures trussed and suspended like an eerie skeleton forest are crafted, stitch be stitch, in a literally painstaking act. Layers of yarn, wax and ashen pigment build slowly on one another in her process-led practice that looks to science for its experimental impetus and rationale. Rachel’s autoimmune disease, and the physical and psychological pain that accompanies it, are mirrored in her depiction of environmental loss and degradation. In her series of photographic nude self-portraits, Rachel’s anguish is palpable. As she strains against an entangled web of her own creation, the uninvited assault of disease on her body is an unmistakable and keenly-felt metaphor for the sweeping and devastating loss in the natural environment.