Rachael Adams

“The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.”

Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

The Emerging Arcadian

Arcadia refers to a vision of pastoralism and harmony with nature. The term is derived from a Greek province with a mountainous topography and sparse population of pastoralists, which later caused the word Arcadia to develop into a poetic byword for an idyllic vision of unspoiled wilderness. Arcadia is a poetic shaped space associated with bountiful nature and visual harmony.

The Arcadian inhabitants were often regarded as living after the manner of the Golden Age, without the pride and avarice that corrupted other regions. It is also sometimes referred to in English poetry as Arcady. The inhabitants of this region bear an obvious connection to the figure of the noble savage, both being regarded as living close to nature, uncorrupted by civilization, and virtuous.

Milton Keynes ate my childhood

Born at home in what are now the fringes of the designated area that became a gridded Milton Keynes – the daughter of a small-holder who was born in the same house, in the same back bedroom, and a groom from the next village – my early years were rural, made up of historical connections. Gravestones in the churchyard mark off a continuous line of forebears.

We ran wild and free, from the rabbitty railway embankment, to the Three Locks canal, to the brambling Brickhill woods. Occasionally we were taken to urban Bletchley, to swim in a pyramid and to buy our school shoes. Milton Keynes crept. Ring-roads and roundabouts determinedly grew into and out of the brooks and bridleways that defined my upbringing. From a train window, I learned that our house on the hill was demolished. The A4146 built, carved out of our hill. The lost landscape hovers tragically, metres above the ‘Beware Soft Verges’ signs. The memory of that hill defines my identity with a sense of before and after; a layer of my life hovers in the air whilst the future is embedded with the Morlocks, metres beneath an old concrete bunker and an elder wood. My practice continuously re-works a sense of being written out of history.

That thin-air gap, between the hawthorn hedges of clay-clogged history and the chalk strata metres below, exists in my mind’s-eye as a cup shaped vessel of possibility. A space where something should happen. The threshold suspends an emotional intensity that cradles childhood memories of damp hay and cowslips and my brother rolling my brother in an old oil drum.

Establishing Shot
A Cup of Possibility
Paintings: The Bigger Picture
The Bigger Picture: A Fiction
An Inquiry of the Memories Stored in Liminal Repositories