RACHEL AKERS

From a very young age, Rachel fully enjoyed art and artistic expression. She studied Visual Arts at university where she explored many different artistic techniques. She studied at Central Connecticut State University for the last 6 months of her degree where she found her love of wire sculpting and held her first exhibition with a set of wire jazz musicians.

It was in America that she also tried her hand at jewellery making, this was using gemstone and setting them into a base.

At Central Connecticut State University, she worked behind the scenes on theatre productions, creating large murals for parts of the set design and found a real passion for large scale painting.  This kind of artistic interpretation made her really happy and she found painting murals and creating jewellery and wire sculptures to be very therapeutic and great way to express herself and her feelings.

Rachel finds the juxtaposition of architecture to green spaces in Birmingham quite beautiful and it’s surprising how much woodland and “green space” is still left untouched in a big city like Birmingham.  There are some incredible new and unique buildings going up all around the city but also some stunning old buildings that could be mistaken for a historic building in other European cities, for example our beautiful art galleries and council houses.  In between these beautiful buildings you will always find trees and plants to keep us all in touch with nature.

Rachel now uses these inspirations from her home town in her work, especially in her framed sculptures where you have the harsh solid lines of the frame intertwined with the metal trees cascading from the frame.  She uses metal and gemstones to create bespoke and unusual sculptures that are fluid and winding but also have the rigidity of the metal.  Manipulating the metal into the curves of a natural form.

She liked the idea of combining her metal sculptural wire work with her jewellery and started to wrap gemstones with intricate pieces of woven and twisted wire.

This in turn then went back into the sculptures where she used these wire wrapped gemstones to create large sculpture installations.

She also likes to create pieces of jewellery that are the true definition of “wearable art”.  She constructs pieces of jewellery that when not being worn can be placed into a frame to create a unique sculptural piece to be admired.