Rachael Ashley

Rachael Ashley was born and grew up in West Yorkshire. She moved to London in 1991 to study Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths College. Later, she completed an MA in Communication Design at Central Saint Martins, specialising in photography. After graduating, Rachael worked in London as a graphic designer for many years before a short course in screen printing prompted a return to making creative work. Rachael uses photography as a basis for her screen prints, carefully curating features from the landscapes where she lives and grew up in Photoshop. To create the positives for her prints, Rachael uses a medium format camera in order to capture as much detail as possible, as the process of screen printing is inherently reductive. Often in Rachael’s landscapes, human interventions, such as stone walls on Pennine hillsides or pylons on the Thames Estuary, are contrasted with natural features such as trees and reeds, thereby emphasizing the fragile balance between the man-made and the natural. Rachael has been a member of East London Printmakers since 2019 and has taken part in a number of UK print fairs.