About

I have been painting for as long as I can remember. Not as a pastime — as a way of making sense of the world.

I'm Rachel South, a Queensland-based painter, arts practitioner, mum, and lover of the earth. When I'm not in the studio I'm working on a flower farm, hands in the soil, surrounded by the kind of beauty that keeps finding its way into my work. Nature has always been my subject — birds, botanicals, the wild and spirited creatures of the Australian landscape — rendered with a detail that asks you to stop and really look.

For years my practice lived in that world. Spirited natives. The natural environment. The human spirit woven into the landscape. And quietly, threaded through it all, was hair — appearing again and again as subject, as texture, as something I kept coming back to without fully knowing why.

Over the last two to three years, focused professional development has matured my practice into something more deliberate. The hair work has moved to the foreground — large-format paintings that magnify a single strand, a sweep, a coil of hair until it stops being hair and becomes landscape. Terrain. Memory. Something you want to reach out and touch.

My work sits at the intersection of hyperrealism and emotion. The paintings are densely rendered — technically precise and psychologically charged. Colour is never decorative. It's a register. The surface holds something beyond what the eye first sees, and the longer you stand in front of it, the more it gives back.

Hair is the first thing we control about ourselves and the last thing we let go of. It carries desire, memory, gender, grief, and power — all at once, all without saying a word. Painting it at scale is a way of honouring what we overlook. Of making the intimate monumental. Of asking the viewer to slow down in a world that rarely does.

That impulse — to find the extraordinary in the everyday, to connect people to the natural world and to themselves — has been at the heart of my practice from the very beginning