Rachelle Gardner grew up outside a small town south of Kansas City, Missouri. While hearing the artist’s call at an early age, she developed a knack for drafting and received her undergraduate degree in Interior Architecture from Kansas State University. She worked as a woodworking and design apprentice before inevitably being drawn back to the fine arts. As a mixed media artist, she now focuses on fibers and textiles. Her work has exhibited nationally through grants, scholarships and residencies, and is grateful for her roots in the Kansas City art scene.
Influenced by the passing down of handcraft from one generation to another, Gardner strives to re-contextualize traditional craft. Whether dyeing, felting, dissolving, sewing or melting, textiles connect the artist to these physical forces on a conceptual level, so that the processes utilized to create an object are vital to its meaning. Thread and lacework currently act as the dominant elements in her work; however, she does not shy away from incorporating materials such as resins and ceramics to push the traditional boundaries of textiles. This allows for a contemporary take on the historical practices inherent to fibers and textiles. Drawn to explore and combine extremes, Gardner balances working within the microcosm of texture with questions on the phenomenon of consciousness and modern cosmology and then takes it all with a grain of salt.
