Wondrous Voids

The Intaglio of Rachel Singel

Rachel Singel grew up on a hay farm in rural Virginia. Year after year, she and her family worked tirelessly to keep their fields free of unwanted brush. What attracted her eye as a young artist, though, were not the orderly hayfields on the family farm, but a nearby property where the owners let nature’s abundance have its way. There, weeds and vines grew and spread unchecked by any human hand, and the complexity of designs that unfurled inspired some of Singel’s earliest etchings.

She was drawn, in particular, to whorls of greenery and vine shot through with light, creating unexplored voids. “I like the idea of all that complexity and then— nothingness,” she says now from her studio at the University of Louisville where she is an assistant professor of printmaking. “There is a sense of mystery inside that which you can’t quite see.”

From tree bark to seedpods, to birds’ nests of twigs, to fish nests of stones in creeks, Singel is an artist who finds inspiration in intricate natural structures—and in the voids they create. She speaks of her artistic life as vocation without end. Holding up a pinecone in her studio, she gushes, “I have a continuous job—nature is so complex, no matter how long I draw, I could never get the amount of detail that is in this creation. That is a wondrous pursuit.”

In her practice, she adheres to a principle shared by a past professor: “Process rescues us from the poverty of our intentions.” She approaches her prints as a collaboration between herself and the materials she has mastered: copper plates and paper made by hand. Her prints embody affection for nature’s unruly intricacies, for its elaborate structures, and delight in the accidents of process.