Rachel Stanley

Artist Profile

Rachel Stanley (b. 1996, Epsom, UK). Lives and works in Perthshire, Scotland.

Rachel Stanley is a painter whose work moves between abstraction and figuration, drawing on the Scottish landscape and the human body. Working in oil, acrylic and wax on calico, burlap and wood panel, she makes small paintings in which a river can read as a vein, a plateau as a resting body, or peatland as a patchwork quilt.

Each painting begins with something observed directly: a hillside, a snowfield, a peat hag, the point where land meets water. Stanley travels across Scotland to walk, draw, take rubbings and photograph, then develops this material in the studio, where it becomes more fragmented. She stains thinned pigment into calico, drags wax through oil, adds marble dust for texture and leaves the grain of a wood panel visible. Her viewpoints shift from work to work, from a bird’s-eye view to a cross-section through the ground, and she sets the long time of geology against the brief time of a human life. Recent works, most under 30 centimetres, include Peatscape (2024), Down by Siccar (2024), The Umbilical Link (2025) and Dreamscape Variation of Loch Tummel (2025).

Stanley worked as an architectural photographer before turning to painting. She studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, and completed an MA in Contemporary Art Practice at Edinburgh College of Art in 2022. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions including The Land at the Dick Institute, Kilmarnock (2025), Art and Neurodiversity at Sotheby’s, London (2024), An Elastic Continuum at S1 Artspace, Sheffield (2023), and At The Edge of Everything at Cabin, Berlin (2023). She was shortlisted for the Gilchrist-Fisher Award in 2023-24, received the Creative Scotland Visual Artist and Craft Maker Award in 2024 and 2025, and undertook a WASPS residency in Shetland in 2024. She is the founder and host of Listening Party, a community for artists and makers in Edinburgh.