Rachel Reeve is an interdisciplinary artist based in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley. Her practice encompasses printmaking, textiles, sculpture, installation, and design, exploring relationships between the natural world, memory, and lived experience.
Working with seaweed, botanicals, fish, and other organic materials, she creates impressions through direct contact, allowing the forms and textures of nature to participate in the making of an image.
A graduate of NSCAD University, Reeve has exhibited in Canada, Japan, and the United States. Her years living and working in Japan continue to inform her approach to materials, composition, and artistic expression.
Working across printmaking, textiles, sculpture, and mixed media, my practice draws upon direct encounters with the natural world. Organic forms become both subject and collaborator, their impressions revealing details of line, texture, and movement.
My work develops through experimentation, observation, and an interest in the symbolic relationships between nature and human experience.
Frondescence
Usagi Gallery, Brooklyn, New York | September 16–28, 2026
In 2024, I discovered Usagi, a hybrid gallery and cultural space in Brooklyn designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto. I felt an immediate connection between its architecture and my artistic practice.
The space features fourteen movable panels inspired by the sliding screens of traditional Japanese homes, allowing its interior to be continually reconfigured. This architectural fluidity resonated with my longstanding interest in Japanese aesthetics, spatial relationships, and the idea of thresholds.
Frondescence brought together hand-printed seaweed, fish, and botanical impressions on Japanese paper and cotton, alongside sculptural elements, journals, and personal symbolism. Large-scale textile works, including noren inspired by traditional Japanese doorway curtains, introduced further layers of passage and movement within the gallery.
The exhibition explored relationships between the natural world, memory, and lived experience, inviting visitors to slow down, notice, and enter.
Discover more about Frondescence, from the direct-contact printing processes that bring seaweed, fish, and plants into the making of each image, to the personal symbolism, memory, and ideas that shaped the exhibition.
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Frondescence brought together years of experimentation with botanical impressions, gyotaku, and textile printing in an installation of large-scale works on Japanese paper and cotton. Seaweed, plants, fish, and other organic materials gathered from Nova Scotia's coastlines, rivers, lakes, and rural landscapes participated directly in the making of the images. Through contact, pressure, and movement, their forms and textures became impressions that hold traces of an encounter.
The exhibition extended these processes into an immersive space where individual works could be experienced in relation to one another. Hand-printed noren, traditional Japanese fabric dividers, introduced thresholds between spaces, while the scale and movement of the textiles invited a more physical experience of the work. These arrangements reflected my interest in the relationships between body, landscape, and the spaces we inhabit.
Created during a time of ecological uncertainty and social change, Frondescence also reflected a desire to consider our relationship with the natural world. Marine and botanical forms carry associations with growth, vulnerability, transformation, and renewal. Rather than illustrating these ideas directly, I am interested in how meaning emerges through materials, process, and the personal experiences we bring to an encounter.
For me, Frondescence marked a significant development in my artistic practice. It brought together processes I have explored for many years while creating space for a more extensive integration of personal symbolism, mythology, memory, and writing. These elements have long been present in my work, but the exhibition offered an opportunity to explore their relationships on a larger scale.
An important part of this development was the inclusion of Birdman, a symbolic figure who first appeared in my drawings in the early 1990s. Over more than thirty years, Birdman has remained a presence in my journals, drawings, sculpture, and an ongoing handwritten correspondence. I have come to understand this figure as a kind of daimon or tutelary presence, existing somewhere between companion, witness, guardian, and messenger.
The Bird Journals have provided a space for reflection, imagination, and the exploration of lived experience. Bringing aspects of this private practice into Frondescence introduced another dimension to the exhibition, connecting the physical impressions of the natural world with the less tangible landscapes of memory and inner life.
The title Frondescence was discovered in my grandmother's 1913 pocket dictionary. Referring to the unfolding of leaves, the word resonated with the processes of growth and transformation that have shaped both my life and artistic practice. Its discovery became the starting point for an exhibition that brought together familiar materials, longstanding relationships, and new possibilities for expression.
