Rachael Dewhirst
About Rachael Dewhirst
Rachael Dewhirst was born in Warkworth and raised in rural Mid Canterbury. She studied at Ilam School of Fine Arts, graduating with first class honours, and has exhibited over the years in galleries the length of the country, from PG Gallery 192 in Christchurch to Bowen Galleries in Wellington and Bath Street Gallery and Warwick Henderson Gallery in Auckland. Rachael now lives on the Tawharanui Peninsula, where she and her husband are raising their children, and many of the flowers in her recent work come from her own gardens.
Dr Warren Feeney's 2016 essay Fearless Allegories about Painting 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 are not simply depicted, but become vehicles for exploring colour, gesture, surface, space and the possibilities of paint itself. That early work was characterised by scale, exuberance and a fearless willingness to let figurative and abstract forms collide.
A decade on, her practice has shifted in scale and intimacy while retaining the same fundamental commitment to the possibilities of painting. These works bring the viewer closer, moving between interiors and exteriors, flowers, vessels, gardens and sea views. Fragments of domestic life, including occasional references to childhood objects such as a pacifier or bottle top, sit alongside landscapes and floral forms, sometimes picked out in 24kt gold leaf.
Rather than abandoning the formal concerns of her earlier work, Rachael has brought them into a more personal and intimate space. Colour, pattern, abstraction and gesture continue to disrupt and reshape observed reality, while the physical presence of paint and gold leaf insists on the work as an object in its own right.
Browse Rachael's paintings below, or enquire about a piece.
Exhibitions & events
Rachael Dewhirst | Pocket exhibition | 22 October - 7 November 2026