Rachel Wharton: Wishful Thinking

The longer I live, all roads lead to Kafka. Maybe we’re living through a moment when Kafka’s sensitivity to human alienation feels particularly relevant. Or perhaps it always has. Whichever, when looking at Rachel Wharton’s recent works I was struck by her recurring image of a castle, and his last, unfinished novel came to mind.

Kafka had obtained a promise from his friend Max Brod to destroy his unpublished work after his death, but instead Brod set to editing and it was published in its incomplete state two years later. Whilst I think Brod probably took the right course of action, there will always be a fundamental question about the work’s status. It is, and remains, a work in process.

This sense of the extended duration of making (and its accompanying frustration) also surfaces in the story itself, where the protagonist – a land surveyor named K – makes endless forays towards a castle that has sent for his services. Somehow the castle and its officials always elude him; he is kept at bay, outside its bounds, unable to complete the task he has come to achieve.

This atmosphere of ambivalence towards completion, wholeness or resolution seems entirely appropriate to Rachel’s plans. Her year as the fellow at Belfast School of Art has afforded her the time to take a deep dive into her own painting processes and stay there for a while. What has emerged is a compelling exploration of an artist’s thinking that sheds light on the creative methods of a contemporary painting practice. 

As an emerging artist it takes a while to work out what kind of artist you might be. There’s a certain bravery needed to dwell in your own thinking and making, and ambition required to explore how both might change. Support for this important work has come through the time the fellowship has provided, but also, crucially, through its educational setting.

Indeed, whatever politicians tell us, we might accurately think of an educational environment as being more about process and less about outcome. It’s a space that allows a kind of meditation, a figuring-things-out, often in the company of others. Seeing different minds at work at similar problems in diverse ways helps shake up your own thinking and doing.

It’s hard work reorientating a practice, particularly a successful one, but it’s necessary if you want to develop a fundamentally different kind of relationship with the work – which is precisely the challenge Rachel set herself.

Her earlier work displays what one might term an analytical method, for example she often evolved a colour palette from a canonical painting and redeployed this in own her work, evoking atmosphere and intent. But sensing an absence from her own practice, Rachel was fascinated by approaches to painting that went beyond the visual play of colour, composition and mark- making, and offered instead an intense psychological draw, for both artist and viewer.

This is particularly useful to Rachel because much of her painting centres on communication and language, how meaning (both emotional and intellectual) is forged or falters. Rachel sees her time in Belfast as research – an attempt to examine what underpins or underlies her painting practice – rather than a moment to produce, and it is clear the results of this fellowship will take years to unpack.

If work arrives now, as it inevitably does, it is the byproduct of this moment of radical rethinking. I use the word radical in its etymological sense: she wants to get to the root of things to rethink some primary relationships in a painting practice – between depiction and object depicted, for instance, or between mark and image, between words and form, between different modes of representation, between viewer and maker. It is these ‘betweens’ that are of particular importance to her new work, what she has termed, ‘the stretchiness of the space between idea and painting’. (1)

Let’s return to the castle. Rachel’s castle differs from Kafka’s: whilst his is ‘a complex of buildings’ one might have taken for ‘a small town’ (2), hers shape shifts. The image originates in a depiction by the French eighteenth-century painter Corot and resonates with a child’s garden play-castle or the destiny of family National Trust days out, where visitors seek an understanding of how earlier communities fortified themselves or enacted class divides – structures that place a demand on the imagination for re-enactment. (3) 

But Rachel’s castle resonates with Kafka’s in some ways. For instance, it has a rather mysterious presence amongst her work. These castles exercise more control over their surroundings than can be technically accounted for. Elements of Corot’s castle crop up over several canvases and drawings and reappear in the multiple and rudimentary 3D pieces that it seems Rachel is compelled to make and remake.

The castle for Rachel is multivalent, it links a child’s imaginary with history and culture and in doing so becomes the touchstone for the worlds Rachel brings into relation. It resurfaces across high and low culture, in romantic paintings, in folk tales and mythologies; it is both rarefied and commonplace.

The castle intensifies, becomes more castle-like, as it moves from actuality towards idea. For example, her local castle while in Belfast was somewhat overshadowed by its status as the site of the mythical ‘Cave Hill diamond’. This ‘diamond’, suggestive of the Koh-i-Noor’s magical properties, was revealed in the late nineteenth century to be a rather less exciting lump of quartz, yet somehow the title remains.

The castle, then, gives a clue to the semiotic element at play across Rachel’s output. Like a Freudian dream analysis, language and visual images are intertwined, the same noun can denote very different things.

The road where Rachel lived in Belfast, named after the castle’s deer park, allows her to imaginatively conjure the extinct Irish elk back to the site, as history gives way before the power of suggestion. Often triggered by her observations of Northern Ireland – a place she inhabited with a stranger’s eyes – she casts free the images, words and marks that are deeply embedded in psyches, art histories or mythologies. Rachel disentangles them from their context and in doing so lightens their load, firing them out as emissaries to see how they settle or spark others into life.

Often her paintings and drawings present images – a rabbit, a sheep, the back of someone’s head, a building – isolated on a painted ground or piece of paper. She is fascinated with the way Beatrix Potter’s illustrations sometimes expand across or out of her scene’s frames and slide across the page.

In other works, marks form a kind of lattice, a spatial depiction that provides passage between gaps or vortexes. Rachel uses juxtaposition as a method of storytelling; works inflect on each other by proximity, sense depends on your neighbour, like jumbled words in a sentence.

Vaulting across absences co-opts the space between into the work. She notices how scale shifts around her: worlds can be contained in worlds, stories within stories. Works proliferate and generate others. There is a liveness: all is contingent, rehearsal, things can be made and remade. (4) Within this logic her teaching becomes another element of her practice.  

The workshops Rachel devised for the students at Ulster University addressed questions she asks herself. In one such workshop, she asks them to each describe an idea for a painting and later it will be realised by a peer. She wants to know what happens to the idea cut loose from its author. Will it wither and die without its originator’s vision or flourish under someone else’s brush?

It’s a test of course, of how we invest meaning in things, of authorship and ownership, of imagination and flexibility. In this way, as she encourages the students to visualise inhabiting a painting and describe the experience, the workshop generates streams of words that evoke a dreamlike, associative state.

This is the poetry of her process, the kind that allows absurdity and humour a free reign. Animals appear to morph and their shadows solidify. Small soft Arte Povera sculptures – the burrows – are homes for unknown creatures, continuing to suggest Kafka. (5) She wonders what the sad swedes remaindered in her local supermarket do at night and is concerned that they sleep well. 

Her painting becomes like thinking. In stretching the space (or is it the time?) between idea and painting she risks stretching it out of shape altogether, but this seems to be a risk worth taking.

Kafka’s idea for The Castle was noted in his diary in 1914, but he did not start writing it until 1922 when he alighted in the Czech mountain landscape that became the book’s setting. That’s a long time to hold an idea before a place claims it. Occasionally a work doesn’t have to be complete, it just needs to rest somewhere for a moment. 

1.  Press Release to Rachel Wharton’s Queen Street Studios exhibition, February 2025. 

2.  Franz Kafka, The Castle, translated Anthea Bell, Oxford University Press, 2009 [1926], p11. 

3.  I am indebted to Rachel Wharton for this observation. 

4.  See Russell Ferguson & Francis Alÿs, Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal, 2007, a text that interests Rachel Wharton. 

5.  'The Burrow' is an unfinished short story written by Kafka in 1924 and published posthumously. 

Rachel Wharton’s artworks create and reveal a series of tangential links.

Living on Deerpark Road in Belfast for the duration of the fellowship, Rachel became concerned with the origin of its name, the private enclosure of land for recreation, sport or agriculture, the connections between deer parks and castles, and the pictorial and historical representations of these spaces. This constellation of associations appears in her work as text from archaeological surveys, as drawings of castles from memory, as paintings that reference notable works from art history or family photographs, as the culmination of a journey to track down an idealised agricultural landscape printed on the side of a bread van.

Rebecca Fortnum is an artist, writer and academic. She is currently Professor of Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and her solo exhibition, ‘Les Praticiennes’, was exhibited at the Henry Moore Institute in 2023. 

Launched in 2021, the Freelands Studio Fellowship takes place annually to connect six artists with partnered UK host universities. The programme aims to foster a symbiotic relationship between teaching and artistic practice to enrich both artists’ and students’ work, facilitated by the environment of the artist studio and within the specific context of an art school. The 2024 Fellowship concluded with a group exhibition titled 'Enfold, Unfurl’, held in March 2025.