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 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...

Much of my current work is autobiographical, dealing with issues of familial and emotional abuse, personal identity and the fragility of ego. I am currently working on a series of purses and boxes based on objects discovered in my mother's house after her death. This image is the inside of an embroidered purse entitled 'Come and Tell Your Mother You Love Her'. Generally speaking, my work focuses on the tension between traditional female archetypes of folklore and fairytale, and ideas of femininity and feminism in contemporary society.  I work in mixed media with an emphasis on textiles, using machine and hand embroidery to embellish appliqued, patchworked or quilted pieces.  The blog is written to give a little context around each of my pieces of work.  Having 'bottled it' on the first day of Art College nearly three decades ago I have recently returned to finding and developing my voice in visual art by joining a post-grad art course locally at Artpocket studio....