eStudio Visit with Rachel Stanley
Edinburgh-based painter Rachel Stanley creates mutable, perspective-shifting works that blur abstraction and figuration, and fosters creative community through her monthly Listening Party Club.
I first discovered Rachel Stanley through a friend who spoke about a listening party she’d organized in Edinburgh. Intrigued by the concept, I looked her up—and was immediately struck by the depth and originality of her paintings. I’ve been following her practice ever since.
Based in Edinburgh, Stanley navigates the liminal space between abstraction and figuration in evocative, mutable landscapes. Her work shifts and fragments perspective—looking across, over, under, and through—to deconstruct the familiar into something uncanny. Occupying a grey “in-between,” each composition rewards repeated viewings, revealing new layers of meaning and unexpected moments of resonance.
Beyond her studio practice, Rachel is the driving force behind the Listening Party Club, a monthly meetup that brings together artists, writers, crafters, designers, and more to share, connect, and inspire one another. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with her to learn more about her creative process and the vision behind both her painting and this vibrant community initiative.
How would you describe your work within 3 words?
‘painting big hills’
Your work blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration. How do you decide where to position a piece on that spectrum?
Perhaps if I’ve recently made something more abstract I’ll try and go the other way and be more figurative, but mostly it sort of decides for itself as it’s being made. I tend to work from images at the moment; often I’ll start painting a more representational depiction, then get bored with any sense of realism, then adopt a more playful approach, then work over it, and over time it becomes something more fragmented. I think I’m most interested in when a painting blurs the lines between the two categories and could be read as two different things. I’m interested in multiple truths existing at once.
You mention a focus on natural forms and the human body. Are there specific experiences or moments in nature or human interaction that inspire your pieces?
I’m very interested in exploring the universality which exists across different forms. I like to suggest parallels between external and internal worlds – I suppose this links to my point above about multiple readings of a painting. Previously I have referred to the internal body in a more direct way, often using traditional medical illustrations or diagrams as source material. More recently, due to direct encounters with the Scottish landscape, things I’ve directly seen have become my source material. Everything usually circles back in some way to this intersection between body and landscape, though, as I like to play with notions of what a landscape is. If I start with a landscape, but it moves towards abstraction, perhaps I use fleshy tones or an unusual perspective, can I move it away from the tradition and towards something else? What is this place? In terms of specific moments, recently I learned that a pap is a name (derived from Old Norse) for a breast-shaped hill, so I’m going to try and paint some of those.
Can you describe how your intuitive and sensory process unfolds in the studio? Do you begin with a plan, or is it entirely exploratory?
At the moment I’m slightly limited on the full days I can spend in the studio, so I’ve found some level of preparation helps – but often this just needs to be a feeling of what I’d like to make, or notes describing an image, or a very scrappy drawing. I suppose I don’t follow a thick and fast rule for the painting process, otherwise it becomes something which overwhelms me. I am always working on multiple things at once so that even if one work is being painted in a more traditional way, I can also be making another which is looser. I suppose I enjoy scratching different itches at once and seeing what sticks.
You mention your paintings “reveal themselves over time.” How do you decide when a work is finished?
The best way I can describe knowing when a work is finished is that it’s almost like maths – like a sum needs to be worked out, then once it’s done there’s nothing more to be done, and that is that. It’s definitely a feeling that emanates from the work rather than anything conscious.
What inspired you to create Listening Party, and how did the idea come about?
The idea hatched a few years ago when I was living in London. I hadn’t gone to art school but everyone I knew was a maker of some sort, so I wanted to create a community amongst friends where we could talk about what we were making. For various reasons it didn’t really take off, but last year in Edinburgh, I put on a group show with two wonderful collaborators; we had such a good time and introduced each other to new artists, who then become friends. By this point I had been to art school for my MA, but my collaborators hadn’t (we’d all chosen more traditional writing-based subjects for our Undergraduate courses but were still very visual outside of this). The opening night was busy, and it made us realise that the artist community around Edinburgh is strong, you just need work a bit to seek it out. We wanted to keep the ball rolling after the show, so the ambition to form a community art group arose again and it grew from there.
What have you learned about the creative community through hosting these events?
I have met some wonderful and talented people who make all kinds of things, all doing their best to make ‘making’ as much of their life as possible. What I love most is how our attendees place just as much importance on listening to others and offering guidance and support, as they do on receiving feedback themselves.
If you could expand Listening Party or take it in a new direction, what would that look like?
Mostly we would like to have the capacity, time, and funding to branch out from the monthly sessions and transition into using LP as a curatorial base – putting on shows, inviting others to host workshops, running Q&As with interesting people, et cetera. We have been using a monthly framework which can be quite labour intensive, especially without funding and whilst juggling other things. Moving away from this feels like a new direction into more intentional programming. It felt a shame to be experiencing a form of self-imposed burnout from a project which is meant to champion sustainable practice! Working in a more ad-hoc way, we hope to do less, but better.
For more of Rachel, follow her on Instagram
Thank you Rachel !
With peace & love
xx