Rachael Edgar

My work begins with the experience of motherhood and opens out into broader questions of responsibility, fear, and hope. In my intaglio series In Responsibilities Begin Dreams, I reimagine children from found family photographs, lifting them from their original contexts and placing them in new, imagined worlds. Through this, I move between the intimate and the universal: moments from my own life become a way to think about the futures we collectively hope for—for other children as well as our own. The found images act as a bridge between personal memory and shared narratives, allowing the children depicted to become symbols of possibility, vulnerability, and the quiet bravery that childhood often requires.

Although my medium of choice is printmaking, in particular etching, my preparatory work uses alternative photography, collage, and blackout poetry to create imageandlanguage studies that help shape tone, form, and meaning before the plate is bitten. These experiments allow me to think through the personal narrative at the heart of the work and the wider questions it connects to, giving space for intuition and association before everything is translated onto the plate. Together, these stages form a practice rooted in care, imagination, and the boundaries between the known and the unknown.

I choose etching because it walks a fine line between control and surprise. The plate can produce moments of unexpected magic that no other medium gives me—accidents that feel both unpredictable and strangely inevitable. Each print becomes a record of that ongoing conversation between discipline and discovery, intention and chance. This tension echoes the emotional landscape I am trying to articulate: the way hope persists alongside uncertainty.