Call Me When We Land, 2025
This body of work is anchored in the idea of landing, not only in a place, but within an emotional or physical state. Call Me When We Land is a phrase of care and reassurance, spoken at the threshold between distance and grounding. It marks the moment when movement gives way to presence, and feeling begins to settle.
The works were made across New South Wales and Western Australia, where I spent my childhood and where my family still live. Although I’ve spent most of my adult life in Sydney, the west remains an internal compass, a place of memory, family, and early belonging. Home, for me, is less a fixed location than a felt orientation, something recognised internally rather than arrived at geographically. It’s possible to feel homesick, even when physically settled.
Working intuitively through poured colour and layered stains, I allow sensation rather than narrative to guide each painting. These works are not descriptions of place, but internal landscapes, moments of arrival, pause, and quiet recognition. I’m interested in how feelings can carry weight yet remain transient: how we soften, withhold, or release them as a form of self-protection, and how our emotional positions, like colour, remain changeable rather than fixed.
Rather than offering resolution, the paintings hold that moment of landing, where weight, openness, and uncertainty coexist and invite the viewer to recognise where, or how, they themselves have arrived.
Olsen Gallery, Woollahra 4-28th February, 2025
ABOUT
Rachelle Lawler is a contemporary Australian artist whose work explores the emotional and immersive power of colour. Her expansive, layered paintings draw viewers into quiet, contemplative spaces, where subtle shifts in tone, hue, and texture convey the weight of memory, place, and lived experience.
