About the work

Using familiar yet incongruous images within her work, Goodyear’s drawings explore notions of fears and desires, residing in a place just between the conscious and subconscious. She often describes her images as ‘fragments’ like fleeting thoughts or visions that fluctuate between the real and the imagined. Occurrence presents an anonymous woman in a red cloak, plucked out of time and place to be reimagined within her drawings. The golden forms that appear around her, may be some phenomenon that is in progress, or could be read as physical manifestations of emotions and the psyche. The drawing remains deliberately ambiguous offering the viewer space to read different possibilities or impossibilities within the image, that so often tread a fine line between the gentle and the malevolent.

Date and country of birth

1978, GB

About the artist

Born 1978 Oldham, Rachel Goodyear lives and works in Manchester and Salford. Graduated from BA Fine Art Leeds Metropolitan University (2000).

Throughout her practice Goodyear presents timeless, uncanny scenes which toe the line between beauty and terror. Recurring motifs appear both strange and familiar, a contemporary play on the traditions of twentieth Century Surrealism and psychoanalysis. She often describes her images as ‘fragments’, like fleeting thoughts or visions that fluctuate between the real and the imagined. Working predominantly with pencil on paper, Goodyear treats the surface as a threshold, like a permeable membrane, through which the imagined space can slip off the page into hand-drawn animations, cut-outs and installation.

Selected solo exhibitions include Limina, York Mediale and York Museums Trust Human Nature commission, York Art Gallery (2020); Catching Sight, The New Art Gallery, Walsall (2017); Approaching the Surface, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2016); Restless Guests, The Drawing Center, New York (2015); and Modifications of the Host, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2011). Selected group exhibitions include The Way We Are 2.0, Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen (2020); A Trick of the Light, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool (2019); The Innsbruck International Biennale of the Arts (2016); Telling Tales, The Freud Museum, London (2016); The Curitiba Biennale, Brazil (2013); Drawing Stories, Museum Folkwang, Essen (2012); and Made Up, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool Biennial (2008)

Residencies include The Banff Centre, Alberta (2010).