Flowers for you | Rachael Dewhirst Pocket Exhibition | 22 October - 7 November 2026

Flowers for you, a Pocket Exhibition by Rachael Dewhirst, brings her intimate explorations of flowers, gardens and domestic life to Frame Gallery this Spring.

Born in Warkworth and raised in rural Mid Canterbury, Rachael Dewhirst studied at Ilam School of Fine Arts, graduating with first class honours. Over the years, her work has been exhibited widely throughout Aotearoa, including at PG Gallery 192 in Christchurch, Bowen Galleries in Wellington, and Bath Street Gallery and Warwick Henderson Gallery in Auckland.

Rachael now lives with her family on the Tawharanui Peninsula, where the surrounding landscape and her own gardens have become an increasingly present part of her practice. Many of the flowers appearing in her recent paintings are drawn from this immediate, domestic landscape.

In his 2016 essay Fearless Allegories about Painting, Dr Warren Feeney positioned Rachael’s work within the longstanding conversation between representation and abstraction. He described her paintings as “allegories of painting”, works in which landscape, objects and recognisable forms become a means of exploring colour, gesture, surface, space and the possibilities of paint itself. Her earlier work was marked by scale and exuberance, with figurative and abstract forms brought together with a fearless sense of experimentation.

A decade on, Rachael’s practice has shifted towards a quieter scale and greater intimacy, while retaining that same fundamental curiosity about what painting can do. Her recent works bring the viewer closer, moving between interiors and exteriors, flowers, vessels, gardens and glimpses of the sea. Fragments of domestic life appear alongside these observed forms, including occasional references to childhood objects such as a pacifier or bottle top. In some works, floral and landscape forms are picked out in 24kt gold leaf, adding another layer of material and meaning.

Rather than moving away from the formal concerns that have long shaped her practice, Rachael has drawn them into a more personal space. Colour, pattern, abstraction and gesture continue to interrupt and reshape the observed world, while the physical presence of paint and gold leaf remains central, reminding us that these are not simply images of the world, but paintings in their own right.