Rachael Nee
The artist Yves Klein called the flame ‘a living brush’. Nee uses the sooty carbon trace left from a candle flame to make her smoke drawings. This ephemeral material expresses the passage of time, memory, absence and our fragile and transient nature.
Nee’s recent works have taken a look at the sooty material itself, the element of carbon, often called ‘the backbone of life’. This was the starting point for a series of works called ‘Carbon Based Forms’. The geometric designs are drawn from the crease patterns that remain from unfolded origami. Nee saw a parallel between carbon and origami, in both, the complexity of form comes from the simplicity of a small building block, an atom or a fold, repeated and evolving to create a limitless number of structures.
A background in ceramics no doubt explains why Nee is drawn to fire as a creative tool. Working with and enjoying the element of risk; total concentration is needed to make the drawings. Fire creates an irreversible transformation, there is no going back; images cannot be unburned. Nee was elected an Academician of the Royal West of England Academy in 2007 and selected for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2005.
