rach downie is a Byron Bay-based artist working across ceramics and mixed media painting. She studied fine arts before spending fifteen years as a secondary visual arts teacher, a practice grounded in exploring, learning, looking, making, and the accumulation of material knowledge.
Her work moves between two bodies: the earthen series of hand-formed ceramic spheres and palimpsest paintings built from shellac, bitumen, gold leaf, and earth pigments on dictionary-page substrates. Both lines of inquiry share an attention to surface, time, and what persists beneath.
downie's paintings are layered, literally and conceptually, drawing on the traditions of artists like Anselm Kiefer, Cy Twombly, Tàpies, and Doris Salcedo, alongside the raw mark-making of Basquiat, and asemic writing. Rosalie Gascoigne's use of found material and Barbara Kruger's confrontational economy of language are quieter presences.
The ceramic work has been exhibited in gallery contexts, the spheres sitting in dialogue with ideas of completeness, fragility, and the elemental.
downie works from a dedicated studio. Her practice is material-led and considered.