Sculptor Rachel Carter works from The Garden Studio on the Derbyshire / Nottinghamshire border, creating large scale sculpture for the landscape and smaller intimate sculptures for the home using the lost wax technique to create bronze works. 

Throughout my professional practice, since graduating with a BA Hons in Applied Arts, I have found myself driven by process and material in sculpture. Repetition features heavily in my work, this could be the process of applying multiple identical lengths of material onto a frame to create surface pattern, or in the creation of an installation made from many identical forms. Hand processes such as weaving, knotting & tying, crochet and even corn dollie weaves have allowed that repetition to flourish to a point where my hands can almost sculpt independently of thought.

Many of my commissions are underpinned by my love of history and ancestry, and I feel honoured to be able to represent our shared and complex histories within sculpture. Looking at my own ancestry often provides inspiration for new work as I add to the long legacy of weavers, knotters and makers that stretch back over 350 years of the Midlands industrial past.

For the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower sailing in 2020 I was commissioned to create a new series of work for the Pilgrim Roots districts. The ‘Pilgrim Woman’ sculptures combined my hand woven work alongside community weaving which was cast in bronze. Pilgrim Woman: Doncaster is a plus life size pilgrim who stands in the centre of the Danum Gallery, Doncaster a stones throw from the birth place of Pilgrim William Bradford, her smaller sister Pilgrim Woman: Gainsborough stands overlooking the River Trent which carried the families as they fled England searching for religious freedom. Finally two bound women make up Pilgrim Woman: Boston, sitting in the shadow of St Botolphs Church they stands together in their beliefs just a stones throw from the very jail cell they were incarcerated in.

Her latest project Standing In This Place is an arts and heritage project in collaboration with the Legacy Makers group formed in 2014 by Bright Ideas Nottingham and the collaborative community-academic Global Cotton Connections project. It looks to highlight the contributions and connections between white mill workers and black enslaved women uprooted to the Americas, showing how their stories and histories are connected by cotton, sorrow, strength and resilience.

Rachel Carter creates woven sculptural pieces that demand a second look - and touch - from the viewer. The organic shapes are not crafted from willow as they appear, but using a method with wax the artist has developed to create the swirling, spherical monuments in Bronze.

Fluid shapes and geometric patterns found in nature have been translated through Carter’s signature swirling weave using a range of techniques including crochet, basketry and macrame. The methods the artist once used with willow are now immortalised in breath-taking bronze; her unique process ensuring that every creation is an original, one-off piece.

In fact, in 2013 Carter became the first artist to weave in wax to create bronze sculptures using her wax method. Originally exhibited at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, the first bronze piece can now be seen sitting within the Derwent Valley. Since then Rachel has been developing the wax weaving method further, experimenting with new resistant materials and methods of casting - that in some cases have not been used for thousands of years - to push the craft as far as it can go.

Text taken from Artist Profiles, Inside Artist magazine 2015