Rachael Brown
Artist Illustrator Educator
Current Projects
Time After Time
In 2023, I completed an MA in Illustration, where I developed and refined hand-crafted techniques in printing, painting, collage, and drawing, and deepened my focus on visualising environmental and political themes.
My final project, Time After Time 2016–2017, is the first in a series of three hand-crafted narrative scrolls documenting the extraordinary social, political, and environmental events between 2016 and 2021—a period framed by the U.S. presidential elections. These years saw the rise of the political right, the refugee crisis, and escalating climate disasters, but also acts of resilience, activism, and protest that inspired hope and the possibility of change.
The work also invites reflection on humanity’s place within vast spans of time and interconnected scales of existence.
Hope Punk
I’ve been inspired by Rob Hopkins’ book From What Is to What If… which champions joyful play and storytelling as powerful tools for imagining the futures we want to create. Hopkins urges us to design collaboratively and sustainably to shape communities and ecologies where people and nature can thrive together. He refers to Alexandra Rowland’s term HopePunk—a way of living that chooses peaceful protest over despair, active agency over apathy, and a belief that every individual can spark change, whether subtle or profound.
This spirit of resilience runs through both my artwork and my teaching of MA Interior Architecture and Design students who are encouraged to envision spaces that are meaningful, sustainable, and alive with possibility.
Tyneham Unravelled
I also enjoy creating hand-crafted, narrative illustrations to communicate complex stories of heritage, space, and time.
For this project, I created a 2.5-metre-long scroll telling the story of Tyneham—a Dorset village inhabited for over 3,000 years until 1943, when its residents were forced to leave so the land could be used for military training during the Second World War.
The work grew out of a 2022 public consultation in Tyneham, part of a University of Portsmouth research project. We set out to discover what visitors understood and valued about the site, and to explore how illustration could deepen their engagement with the wider historical context of the Tyneham story.
Creative Practices
My work explores themes such as scales of space (human, cosmic, and microscopic), cultural sky stories, our relationship with time, historic, environmental, and political narratives, and abstract mapping.
I use hand-crafted methods—screen-printing, painting, and collage—to create abstract and narrative works. Blending found imagery with hand-painted details, I build layered compositions through colour, shape, and pattern. My work is presented as prints, panoramic scrolls, and artist’s books to allow alternative ways of engaging with the work.