(click image for more details)Itchy Back, 2007
pencil and pencil crayon on paper
25cm x 25cm
Slugs In a Chip Tray, 2008
25cm x 25cm
Phantom Pregnancy, 2007
60cm x 42cm
Rachel Goodyear's pencil drawings and watercolours collect together contingently related objects and characters. Mixing sources from both the ordinary and the profound, unlikely relationships are formed and improbable narratives are created, setting off a chain reaction of unforeseen associations. Her world is one that exists outside of 'normal' events, where the contents of each drawing seem preoccupied with their own individual existence within the boundaries of their surface and traditional notions of social etiquette, emotional attachment and morality are of little concern to them.
Often Goodyear works directly on to found surfaces – such as an envelope, bus ticket or a page torn from a notebook – emphasising the temporality and random encounters of what is depicted and the combination of 'ambiguous truths and the blatantly invented'1 they contain.
The drawings are designed to be shown either individually or together, the grouping of which allows further relationships to occur and opens up the possibility of further endless narrative twists and turns depending on a particular configuration.
'Within these works the mundane and the spectacular are levelled out to exist on the same plane which is echoed in the rawness of the presentation [where] any hierarchy between individual pieces is removed.'2
Paul Stone, 2008
1. Statement by the artist, Axis, Open Frequency, June 2005
2. Ibid
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