Rachel’s influences range from artists Robert Rauschenberg, Giacometti, architects Zaha Hadid and Luis Barragan, feminist thinkers Kelly Diels and Aubrey Gordon, choreographers Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch, musicians Air, Daft Punk, Leonard Cohen, Annie Lennox, and Boy George, her parents who are both painters, and her travels to India and the United States. 

When not creating, Rachel works in brand development for small businesses and is busy raising three boys, walking the family’s fabulous poodles, drinking chai with with her husband and friends, jumping in the ocean, and delighting in finding, wrapping and posting presents to loved ones. 

As fashion and design trends have a habit of seeping down into the mainstream consumer market, I recently saw a fluffy blanket Kim K style (and many other furnishings of that ilk) in a chain store…and I bought it. I’m mindful of fast fashion and textiles and I op shop and recycle most of the time but, dear reader, this blanket (and matching pillow cases!) is a delight. Photo by Debby Hudson - Unsplash

Pic: Light installation experimentation.

Life, and all it’s bumps and blips has, yet again, taken me away from writing this newsletter - a thing I very much enjoy doing!. Creativity has been in the everyday though, here’s what I’ve been up to:

The iconic French electronic duo. The soundtrack to my twenties. Every song on Moon Safari (Talkie Walkie, too), like friends keeping me soothed and uplifted on cold trains around Europe, in my rusty car driving around Melbourne, in all those share houses and flats…

The reproduction of sound was unbelievable. The light show along with it, the colours the exact hue of the songs. Every tune and riff I knew.

I’ve been in the process of organizing my prints for sale on my site as framed pictures and large mesh wall hangings. Photographing and styling has proved quite challenging (the semi-transparent quality of the mesh gets lost in the pics) and so I’ve been playing around with video and various photography methods. My merchandiser spirit has had the run around! I look forward to sharing the newly designed website with you next week.

Now for some inspiration. Here are some links from the last few month’s adventures:

Art:

I love these clouds by painter Michelle Purves

My father, Ross Coady’s recent exhibition at Harrington Street Gallery

Design:

The hilarious and inventive way Alex Bitter uses storytelling to market his incredible jewellery. See the adventures of ‘Margeaux’ and her assistant, ‘Jules’ here

Books:

Over December/January (that’s a while ago now!), I read the incredible ‘Doppelganger’ by Naomi Klein. If you’re interested in an incredible analysis of the interplay between online and offline worlds. See a Guardian article on Klein and her book here.

We are asking people to email Frensham Schools with their protest and in support of Sturt. The more pressure we put on Frensham Schools to act responsibly, the better the outcome for Sturt’s future. Pic by by ROMAN ODINTSOV

This week, I thought I'd tell you a little about creating my free download of backgrounds for virtual meetings. Photo used by misszin Getty images.

Manners are a soft edge.

Manners are actions creating a container surrounding the act - an embodied way of showing care and respect to our fellow humans. Photo used by: Techa Tungateja Getty images

Dear, hard working cafe owners, here’s what would help set the stage and restore the theatre! 

Lovely light, moody or sunny.

Plants and material artworks buffering the reverb of concrete floors and walls. 

Chair legs fitted with rubber dampeners if the ceiling is high and sound bouncy. 

Eye contact from the staff and acknowledgement of my payment. 

Pride filling the space - it goes a long way to feeling calm and at ease if you know the owner and staff want you there.

Here’s to the escape of the theatre - to the third space!

While one is plodding, one can’t see the accumulated effects of the plod - trees for the woods, per se. It requires stepping across to another project to see what’s been created in the other. Or it requires time to pass, and distance to be formed. Then, suddenly, you look down at the garden, for example, and there is a huge overgrowth of

My challenge building marketing for Soft Edges Studio is I don’t have a “physical” art practice to photograph. See, I make art on the computer and then order it to be printed with a click of a button.

Then I remind myself why I am working this way. It came from a place of necessity having struggled with fatigue and brain fog for more than a year I needed to find a way to work differently -  to pursue and encourage ease, to conjure calm in the digital folds and soothing colours of my works. 

Harder is not better. I’m reminding myself of this each day in the process of re-imagining what it is to work - a dance between physical and digital realities. 

It is a daily practice of resistance against productivity grind culture.

Yes, these children are now safe in Australia with shelter, food, care and connection but still struggle with very real problems like PTSD. But evidenced on that stage that night was a true act of creating (theater in this case). Creating that was helping these children survive, recover, and hopefully thrive. A process is not only generative, but healing (apart from building awareness in the Australian public around these young refugee stories, this is the premise of the Treehouse Theater program).

I position each image layer, playing around moving them behind and infront of each other, I simultaneously work with each layer’s transparency levels. As I make a layer more transparent, the magic starts to appear…

As someone who has come from decades in the wellness industry where the metaphor of balance (aka middle ground) is used to sell all kinds of snake oil, I need to remind myself that the middle is mythical (Tolkien’s Middle Earth, for example). It is upheld to help us humans, who are in a continual state of flux and change, to feel safe in our bodies, lives, and culture . Mediocre by design. And, perhaps a way for humans to control humans, herding them into the center and leaving the fringe minorities out in the cold.My ideas in my soft edges philosophy is my way of lending a compassionate acknowledgement to life in flux. And, to describe this life through art. A life where nuance is necessary. Where we live in the diverse shades between white and black.

In many corners of capitalism, there is no culture of process, no telling of the weeks, months, and years of process it takes to get to the final product, the published book, the exhibition, the fashion line, the new software. Now, as an emerging commercial artist, I am without the stories of process to look up to, to support my making process, and avoid feeling like I’m working in a vacuum. n many corners of capitalism, there is no culture of process, no telling of the weeks, months, and years of process it takes to get to the final product, the published book, the exhibition, the fashion line, the new software. Now, as an emerging commercial artist, I am without the stories of process to look up to, to support my making process, and avoid feeling like I’m working in a vacuum. 

I have a beautiful studio/office set-up at the back of my garage in my garden. Plants cluster around my laptop as I type. Artworks, in process, sit along the walls. I even have some Pilates equipment to workout on. It is all very nice. Except …

Blue carpet, royal blue and various fading variations of it was, and still is, everywhere in allied health clinics.

It figures; it says clinical, authoritative, regal, and probably hides dirt well. Allied health spaces have high foot traffic so, you’ve gotta be sensible with your carpet color choice, right?

So, when designing calm Pilates studios in the past - spaces where humans are stretching, yawning, getting’ physical, and sometimes vulnerable, I kept puppies in mind as I positioned furniture, lighting, curtains, artwork, and actually signage (we’re a literal bunch) to create an environment, I thought, most conducive to learning and de-stressing (these measures were as much to support me delivering the service as for the clients) and for the best chance of us puppies behaving.

Discovering the richness around you, in the everyday, the extraordinary in the ordinary makes, I think, life more beautiful. I think noticing leads to calm. And when you’re calm, you notice more ;) Photo used in pic by Eric Mclean (Pexels)