Rachy Duffield

I felt inspired, in part by Sky Arts' Portrait Artist of the Year, to get out my acrylic paints and have a go.  In the absence of a life model I used a selfie taken the day before the last of my peroxide was cut off in favour of natural silver- quite a momentous event after twenty years of increasingly yellow locks- and the result is the portrait bottom left, which took about three hours. It went well, considering I haven't painted seriously since A-level art back in 1991(long before I ever went blonde, come to think of it... it seems I'm returning to my roots in more ways than one).  Elated, I needed other faces to paint and my friends were happy to oblige. I don't know the detail of their faces as I do my own, so the pace was slower.  The thing about women my own age is that our faces are 'lived-in' without necessarily having actual wrinkles: challenging to paint. Rosie's impishness (centre bottom) was captured to my satisfaction after four attempts in pai

I believe it was Carl Jung who asked 'What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits'. Yesterday as part of my post grad course at Artpocket studios, I took part in a 'World in a Box' workshop with Eve Pandolfini (@eve.pandolfini on Instagram), and I discovered that Jung was absolutely right.  As a kid I was always turning boxes into little houses or miniature worlds; a street of Oxo box shops, a small Victorian theatre, a matchbox home for a conker, a snow scene in a cereal box, a garden in a dish ... the list was endless. I had the occupants of my dolls house sub-let an upstairs bedroom to a pair of  Austrian dolls in traditional dress, furnished it in cardboard and made their Austrian doll babies their own teeny dolls house. Worlds within worlds. Happiness was scissors, sellotape and a set of felt tips. But when you are a grown up, you forget to be playful.  Yesterday's workshop was a dance back thro

  This piece is quite simply an attempt to capture the contrast between the usual 'dear little old lady' archetype we are all fed, and the nature of my mother. The twee coin purse bearing a cute kitten, the lavender lace and the typical elderly shopping list of rice pudding and custard all belie the last item on the list: an instruction to FUCK OFF.  After my mother's death, a shopping list much like this was found in her kitchen, the unremarkable food items written on a scrap of notepaper in blue biro. The list had a surprising last item of shopping, an expletive written in red capitals. I don't know who -if anyone- the list was for.  The 'tongue' unfurls from the purse, ready to lash out at the unsuspecting shopper.  ******************************** Hand embroidered lilac-grey lace emerging from a charity-shop purse. 

This piece was a commissioned image of the 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich. I absolutely loved researching and making it. It's about light and love. After receiving near-death visions of Christ in 1373, Mother Julian recorded her experiences in  Divine Revelations of Love , the first book written in English by a woman. For much of her life she lived in seclusion in a cell attached to St Julian's Church, Norwich- her real name is not known for certain. As a person of no faith, the glowing positivity of Julian of Norwich's personal faith was indeed a revelation to me. In historical context her ideas were risky, but in authorship she framed them in ways acceptable to the prevailing religious doctrines, the clever lady. AND she had a cat... The piece is worked in layers of raw edged applique in cotton, organza and paper with machine and hand embroidery. I used rectangles to represent the pages of her books of revelations, and lots of yellows, golds and silvers. There'

One of my mother's more unintentionally amusing insults, 'Sex Crazed Urbanites' was the label she gave my cousin and I when we lived in Norwich. No idea why. Probably because we were both unmarried young women with jobs and boyfriends. In a city.  I created the pink neon ribbon because 'Sex Crazed Urbanites' sounds like a good name for a terrible 1980s female punk rock band. The ribbon is tied around a neon stationery box containing neatly printed words: also insults my mother hurled at me, usually if I attempted to dress vaguely fashionably, or go out to any unapproved event or venue. Of course, I never knew which venues or events were approved or not - that was entirely dependent on my mother's mood at the time. The stationery box was inspired by a matchbox of words we found in her jewellery box. I can't remember the exact words, but I remember they were nasty. The matchbox was tucked into one corner of the jewellery box- which, incidentally, was filthy, f

The embroidery on the inside of this purse represents the internal monologue my mother gave me through the words she spoke repeatedly for decades. On the outside are words my father said- barely visible, but indelible in impact.  The purse is representative of many we found tucked away in my mother's bedroom when we cleared her house after her death.  Initially we cleared a light debris of scattered rice pudding tins and all the prescription meds she hadn't been taking. Then we moved on to the contents of her cupboards. Centre stage was her chest of drawers, tacky with badly applied paint effects and tea-stains. In the top drawer we discovered a range of bedraggled little drawstring bags in different sizes and colours. Opening each one revealed a further small and tatty gift box or purse, and inside each of those, a further grubby trinket box or tiny organza bag- the sort cheap jewellery usually comes in- and then within that, a selection of odd items; maybe a broken earring co