Rachel’s Website - https://www.studioreichert.com/
What's your primary medium?
My inclination is to say that I'm a metalsmith because that was where my formal education lies. But I see community engagement and social practice work is sort of also a secondary or like tertiary medium for me. So we're in my metal studio, but I do quite a bit of other things. Writing sculptural works, photography, community work. Yeah. So I guess metals and then a lot of other things from there.
What keeps you going with art?
I couldn't basically live without this. It's such a form of my being that it's sort of just inherent to who I am and what I do. I feel like everything that I'm doing right now, whether it's running the Atlanta school or cultural sites at the city of Boise or writing for various arts magazines or working in my studio, like they're kind of one in the same and it's sort of all in which my life is made up of. And so I do it because I can't not do it. I would say that I don't just sit down and say I'm going to be creative. It's just sort of like always spinning and always working in my brain, you know, all these different ideas are kind of all happening at the same time. And so I think the myth of like an artist going into their studio and having this like blissful, beautiful, quiet, you know, moment where they're putting paint on a canvas or whatever, that's not necessarily what I'm doing. It's just sort of like every second, I'm moving through my day, ideas are happening or I'm processing through something. And my studio is really a place where I can be quiet with those ideas and be experimental and, and work through all the things that are happening outside of the doors of my studio. So I guess for me, whatever is happening in here is like a tangible or physical Way to like process, everything that's happening elsewhere in my life. And so it's nice because I have a private studio, I don't have to share this space with anybody. And it's like right off my house. So I can come out here and do work whenever I want to or have the space I need when I have the time. But then with that said, I really do love collaborations and sharing space with other artists as well. I just think the luxury that I have right now of having this space to myself really has given me a lot of freedom to kind of explore things that I may not otherwise when I'm in a shared space.
Has having a studio impacted your ability to create?
Space for an artist or creative person I feel like is part of the deal, at least from my experience. I've lived in spaces where there is not enough room to have this type of workshop space or this type of experimental space. And it is really difficult to do the work and to, you know, kind of explore the ideas you need to explore. So I feel like without a dedicated space, whether that's shared or solo, it's pretty close to impossible to really do the work that you need to do, even if it's just carving out like a small amount of room in your living room. For me, though, primarily, I work with equipment and tools and acetylene gas and chemicals. And so I just sort of inherently needed A bit more space than a corner in the living room or in previous houses that I've lived in, you know, a bedroom. So, you know, my studio has ventilation and some areas that are dedicated to messy work and some areas that are more dedicated to cleaner work. And then I just have like an insane amount of tools that have to go somewhere. And so yeah, so I think without space, I personally, I don't think I could be doing what I'm doing, I'd have to probably make different work, smaller work, work that maybe works on paper or something. But having this space or a space of this size, which is probably a 400 square foot studio has just allowed me to do the work that I'm doing with that said though, I also wish that I had a bigger space because I'd love to be making bigger work.
What made you decide to work with metal, wood and power tools?
I feel like there are 2d people and 3d people and when I began my studies at the Oregon College of Art and Craft and I was accepted under a printmaking program. And right before I set off to go to school, I changed my major kind of completely. The medium of metalwork was unknown to me, and I had no idea what it was. I had a little internship in high school, working in a mechanic shop and I really loved just the materiality of being in this shop and like getting messy and being able to kind of just experiment with torches and you know all these different hand tools. I was rebuilding starters and for like a fleet of trucks that would come into this mechanic shop and so there was something about just the ability to like shape metal that was really interesting to me or to work with such a hard material. And so when I went to the Oregon College of Art and Craft, I thought actually, I was 17 when I started college, I thought I was starting a larger metals program like a sculptural kind of steel based program and it ended up being jewelry work. And so it was completely by accident, I got into the metals program and started doing small scale work mainly in silver and copper and new gold and learning to set stones and make you know adornment and start thinking more about how my work fits on a body or engages with a body and completely not the larger scale work but I actually fell in love with it. And it was Something I've just stuck with ever since. So it really has just sort of become a part of my process.
Where do you get the inspiration for the art that you create?
The work that I'm making right now. It’s metals based, it's mostly silver and new gold, new gold is an alloy of brass. It's sort of a material that looks a little bit more like gold. Without the price tag of gold. It's a harder metal. And I've been really interested in exploring architecture and history and sort of ancient artifacts in my own practice. And it's really pulling from the content of my other lives. So from Atlanta from the James castle house or other sites that I'm managing. And so, the work that I'm doing is, on the surface, very architecturally driven, it's exploring forms and shapes that you would see in some of the spaces that I'm occupying outside of my studio. But it's also looking at sort of the psychology of architecture and how we occupy space and memory, and our memories of spaces. And so the work that I just completed, that's a combination of metalwork, photography and sculptural work is really looking at architecture from my past experiences that go beyond just the immediate spaces that I'm occupying, whether it's you went to school or the James castle house. My process though is to photo document these spaces and then pull from the photography these shapes and forms and then abstract these shapes and forms, transfer them into some kind of two dimensional form and then apply that to three dimensional form. And then eventually they become some kind of wearable object that can both be worn on on the body or kind of stand on its own in some kind of environment.
Are there any opportunities you think you've had in Boise that wouldn't have been available to you in other places?
Oh, my God, yes. So the opportunities that Boise, and particularly like Idaho at large, but mainly Boise has given me has been the whole, I think, impetus for where I'm at right now. I mean, it's such a safe environment to experiment, to be kind of weird or try new things. And ultimately, it's a super supportive place, super supportive community. The stakes are a little bit lower. And we also have some organizations that are funding the arts that are very instrumental in supporting and sustaining artists. Like the arts and history grant and Surel’s place, not through grant but through residency. The Idaho Commission on the arts, the Alexa Rose, all of which are really specific to supporting Idaho based or in some instances more local based artists. But I think it's just the environment in which you can be experimental or grassroots and it comes with open and welcome arms.
What do you get the most joy out of doing with your medium?
Ever since I was in school, I really loved soldering. Soldering for me is usually soldering hollow forms or some kind of form together. So it's a kind of an integral part of metalworking. But it's one of the stages that I really enjoy the most, because it's super precise. You have these little tiny solder chips that you have to very delicately balance on the edge of a little teeny wire or the edge of a sheet of metal. And the art of not getting them to bounce off while you're heating up the metal and it's getting ready to flow has been almost like a dance performance for me. I mean, it's really just like identifying the stages of how the metal heats up and where, there's a material called flux that you cover your metal in when you're soldering to protect it from oxidation. So you watch how the flux evolves as you're heating it up, and it gets to a certain point and then you can narrow your torch in, and solder something. I guess I really love that metal is typically so hard and so cold and so challenging to work with. But when you get with a torch, it really makes working with metal seem more fluid, and more. I don't know, just I guess, easier to work with and just kind of hand tools.
Can you tell me a little about the Atlanta School?
I moved to Asheville, North Carolina about probably 15 years ago and at the time I really wanted to explore what a craft school looked like. You know, I'd studied at Boise State University and had more of a formal liberal arts background in a fine arts degree. But I was really interested in these small scale craft schools that exist sort of all over but particularly quite a few in the south. And so I went to Penland which is an art school or craft school right outside of Asheville and had just this incredible experience and wanted to come back to Idaho and and bring this experience that I had there here. And so had this moment where my partner in the Atlanta school, Amy O'Brian and our friend, Seth Ogilvie, we went up to Atlanta, and we were just sort of hanging out as friends. And we all just decided one night after a beautiful meal, and it's completely off the grid, so there's no electricity. So this meal was by candlelight. And, you know, I kind of like threw out this idea of running some kind of arts related program that supported other artists and created opportunity here in Idaho up there. And the stages in life that we all three were in seemed like the right moment for all of us to start this kind of wild little project. And our first year we ended up hiring some local artists to do some workshops with us. We had some writing workshops, poetry workshop, and a painting workshop and a few other little funky workshops like corn cob pipe making, and aluminum casting. We had pretty good turnout and we saw that people were really responding to what we were doing up there. It's also in my mind, beyond supporting artists and creating space for artwork and art activity to happen in sort of a low tech, you know, non electrified or Wi Fi space. But it's also an act of preservation of the town itself. So the town has 19 full time residents, that's full time year round, it swells in the summer months. But it's a really incredible historical town that, you know, every so often we lose another building, because they haven't been fully stabilized. And so over time, places like Atlanta lose their history kind of through the loss of the built environment. And so we wanted to sort of find a way for artists to support artists, but also have artists bring life back to this town, and sort of be in conversation with each other. So the town really informs what we're doing through our workshops and the work that people are kind of exploring out there, and the artists sort of do that back for the town. So we're in our seventh year, and it's entirely a project. It's not a business even though it is a business, but it's really not about monetary gain. It's more about community gain. And so it Something we all do, and are able to carve time out of our other lives to make it happen. Mainly because we find it to be such a privilege to be with artists in that kind of intense, quiet, close environment.
Instead of being hindered by being so remote, the distance is the whole point?
Totally yeah, I mean, it's so easy to be distracted in your daily life. There's stuff to do, there's cleaning, there's school work, whatever you know, just life in general. When you're up in Atlanta, there's none of that. A lot of people actually struggle with the lack of technology up there, it does take a minute for some people, but eventually everybody sort of settles and gets into this really beautiful rhythm that happens to be sort of in concert with the sun. We all kind of end up getting up when the sun comes and then tend to end our day when it gets a little darker. It's a quiet place that really doesn't exist in the city or in more metropolitan areas. A lot of people come up by themselves, so they don't have family, or like, roles that they bring with them. They're just sort of there and they're an artist or a preservationist, or a writer or performer or whatever we're doing at the time, and they can just sort of reconnect with themselves and their own creativity, and I don't know. It's a beautiful, quiet place.
Is there anything that you wanted to say that I haven't asked you about?
Let's see. I don't know. Just like you I'm super interested in artists and their studio spaces and how they build their lives, and what makes a sustainable art practice. Both in my own world and in the people that I know’s worlds and elsewhere. So I feel like kind of going back to this full spectrum of work that I do, there is sort of a uniformed space/place narrative that I'm really interested in. And so one of the things I'm working on right now is a study of metalsmiths all over the world. I've been interviewing jewelers and metalsmiths, and everybody has a different title, because we're all we all have complicated feelings about how we call this weird little practice that we all have. And so I've been able to interview all these different artists who are working all over the world in this material, and really try to get a sense of how they build their practice or shape their lives. You know, what are the things that they need to have in place to be able to do what they're doing? Whether it's a significant other that supports them financially, or five jobs that makes their studio work happen, or the galleries they work with, or whatever they're able to find to make all this work. And I guess what I've come to realize, and it's not really a big surprise, but that there isn't sort of a formula for success. I think that it's been for me, and I'm far from it. But for me, it's just a bunch of hard work and trying and failing a million times. And from what I'm gathering from the artists that I'm interviewing and documenting sort of the same thing, identifying, you know, areas of issue within sort of their broader life and then trying to find ways to work around that or to kind of problem solve. So I don't know I guess. I find that really interesting.