Born in Manchester in 2000 and trained at Manchester School of Art, where she completed both her BA and MFA in painting, Rachel Clancy works with the slow, materially rich language of oil paint to construct scenes that feel intimate, theatrical, and just slightly uneasy. Her paintings are inhabited by upholstered fabrics, household objects, and fragments of limbs bathed in slanted light sources and reflective surfaces to create scenes charged with a muted but insistent psychological tension.
Clancy describes her practice as an exploration of “the boundaries of perception,” and this is felt immediately in the way her paintings operate. There is rarely a stable or authoritative vantage point. Instead, the works behave like film stills: flash-frozen images caught mid-gesture, suspended between before and after. The narratives of her scenes are never explicit; they are intoned through layers of glaze, reflected light, and partial obstruction.
This effect is amplified by Clancy’s recurring use of the spherical form - billiard balls, glass orbs, juggling accessories, doorknobs, banister finials - objects that in the history of painting have functioned as training devices for understanding how light behaves on a curved surface. Traditionally used to observe how highlights, shadows, and reflections wrap around volume, the sphere becomes in Clancy’s work something far more unstable: under her flash-like lighting, circles fracture and distort the space around them, bending rooms, hands, textiles. The sphere becomes a perceptual framing of interior and exterior collapsing into one another, meaning and message handed between subjects and thrown back at the viewer.
Much of this ouroborosean tension hinges on Clancy’s use of oil paint as both material and metaphor. Drawing on traditional layering techniques, Clancy builds scenes staged, lit, and cropped in ways that recall both cinema and still-life painting while resisting settling into either. Unsettling, off-stage light sources suggest a presence just outside the frame, a watcher or intruder interrupting the traditional domesticity of the still-life tradition. Her interiors in particular echo the topographical logic of Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space: rooms, corners, and thresholds become repositories of memory and desire. In Clancy’s work, walls, furnishings, and apertures operate as extensions of the psyche, turning domestic spaces (living rooms, corridors, stairwells) and acts (the handing and holding of objects) into a form of psychic architecture. In Clancy’s hands, her cropped viewpoints and obstructed sightlines, these scenes become a site of psychological tension rather than comfort.
Her recent exhibitions, including her solo presentation The Thought Below at Pipeline Contemporary in London, have brought this sensibility into sharper focus. Across these works, she transforms familiar domestic space into a site of perceptual and psychological uncertainty. Objects, reflections, and gestures remain poised in delicate relation to one another, deliberately unresolved, reframing the still-life genre through distortion, reflection, and containment.
