Rachel J Bowler's photos

There is no symbol here. No infinite reaching To the other side. No secrecy Or sacred rites. Patterns of thought And feeling Comfortably cease. There is no need To seek the sky, Or what's beyond. There is already Light enough To see.

Soon the fog will lift And the sun will Tear into Another day. Reaching into The infinite Beyond oneself, The space on The other side, Is limitless In its nothingness.

Benevolently It descends. A half-memory I can't quite Recall, Which still Surprises, As if Something Has already Happened. There is no Uneasiness and The shadows Disappear When I try To touch them. This is how I want it To be.

There’s a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons – That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes – Emily Dickinson

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” ― Albert Camus

“Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail...” Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

Shape shifting their way like fog Through the days, An invisible war has been fought For forty years By ghosts in disguise Who show you who they are Every day If you dare look Into the blue chill Of nothingness.

Rachel is a hobbyist photographer who also makes a few comic poetic attempts. Her work explores the relationship between midlife sub-cultures and very long walks. With influences as diverse as Danny Dyer and Camus, new variations are generated from both explicit, implicit and extra layers. Ever since she was a child, after holidaying at Butlin's Skegness, she has been fascinated by the essential unreality of the universe. What starts out as hope soon becomes corrupted into a carnival of chaos and trips to Sainsbury's, leaving only a lingering sense of what the hell has happened type nausea. Her work is aloof and systematic, and cool, neutral imagery is used. By means of thought processes, she explores the possibility of escape from the corporate world. As subtle phenomena become frozen through boundaried and repetitive practice, the viewer is left without a clue as to the potential or the limits of our future.