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©2026 Gideon’s Bakery
Rachel Collier
April 10, 2026
Volume 2
Issue 22
Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?
Rachel Collier: What attracts me to painting is how deeply you can dive into it. It’s a feeling like romantic love, like being in the ocean of love with painting. I think because it feels emotional to me, I use it as a place to organize whatever urgencies and impulses I am dealing with. Lately, in the real world, we are collectively processing an overwhelming amount of both abundance and scarcity and it is creating a lot of confusion. If I were to relate this to painting, which is what I often do, it reminds me that painting is a place where conflicting ideas and multiple realities exist naturally. A painting can be an object that represents something and it can also be the actual something. It has the function of both the architectural model and the finished building. This concept has power in its potential for immeasurable growth. If you deconstruct the abstract idea of immeasurable growth you find many qualities that can be easily manipulated; it is unverifiable, irrefutable, non-objective, etc. I’m interested in recognizing the ways that people with power manipulate these systems against us and I’m looking for ways to create work in resistance to their false narratives. Abstract painting feels like a place to build resilience by asserting physical forms as adaptable, unrestricted and beautiful. I’m invested in self-generated painting as a place to visually configure our overwhelm into a new kind of abundance.
GB: When you say painting can reconfigure overwhelm into a new kind of abundance, what does that abundance look like materially in the studio? Is it excess, restraint, repetition, scale? Have you read "All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess” by Becca Rothfeld?
RC: I like the idea that some of my fiber work could be evidence that painting has an abundance of qualities that are translatable to materials other than paint. Anything that can be described ‘painterly’ without being made with paint exposes the invisible side of painting. Invisibility lives in darkness which is widely considered a feminine and witchy place to gather wisdom and that feels like the place to be right now. I have not read the Rothfield essays but I’m seeing that one of her themes is that ‘art is the ultimate object of appetite because it cannot be fully consumed or diminished.’ Sounds like she could agree that painting is both the appetite and the food? The appetite is the invisible quality that exists even without the food, the painterly quality.
To further answer your question about materials and studio, I feel like I get a lot of abundance out of ‘scalability.’ Structurally speaking, I love to make the biggest paintings possible for the space they will be shown, I’m working on scaling down which is a challenge. As far as content goes, I focus on forms that feel like they could exist in the micro and the macro or across multiple terrains; ocean, outer space, underground, at the cellular level, etc. If things get ‘landscapey’ which they often do, I try to make that place feel familiar in a psychic way, like it’s a place you could imagine going and here you are.
GB: You describe the invisible side of painting as a dark, feminine place of gathering wisdom. How do you make that invisibility active rather than hidden in the work?
RC: I like this question and I think about it a lot. It sounds like what you are asking is to explain how I bypass the barriers that guard the invisible magical realm. The answer is highly subjective so it’s maybe best explained by talking through process. When I’m painting I try to watch myself like how a person watches a movie in a dark theater, both open to being entertained but also watching critically, looking for interruptions to the ‘suspension of disbelief.’ There is a way something can be too visually familiar or the craftsmanship can fail or the edges around shapes can be too inconsistent or a thousand other things that are disruptive to an immersive experience. Being sensitive to these failures is a way to build trust with myself to better understand when something is coming from the hidden place. I try to focus not on how to render the invisible but on how to create an environment that is sensitive to what has to be erased.
Rachel Collier (b. 1981) is an artist born and based in Minneapolis. Collier’s work is rendered in expansive color, transcribing ecstatic realms that populate our shared consciousness. Repeated abstract forms anchor familiar psychic landscapes to our physical world, stirring the spirit in preparation for advancement or departure. While referencing the languages of maps and topography, her compositions deconstruct from the grid to imagine transcendent space. Collier has her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and recent exhibitions and publications include HAIR+NAILS Gallery (Minneapolis, MN), Felix Fair (LA, CA), NADA Miami (Miami, FL), Intersect Fair (Aspen, CO), the Nemeth Art Center (Park Rapids, MN), I Love You Too (Portland, OR), TOA Presents (Cody, Wyoming), Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation (Ojai, CA), Rochester Art Center (Rochester, MN), Saint Kate’s Arts Hotel (Milwaukee, WI), New American Paintings, MN Artists. Residencies: The Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY (2021, 2022); Anderson Center Jerome Emerging Artist Residency and Fellowship, Red Wing, MN (2022); Nido invitational residency and exhibition, Monte Castello di Vibio, Umbria, Italy (2022); Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO (2022); Roswell Artist-in-Residence (alternate), Roswell, NM (2024-2025.)
The Artist in her studio.