the artist.

Rachel Doniger, a former architect, has been exhibiting her work since 2014. Notable exhibition venues include the Arvada Center for the Arts, Blue Print Gallery, and Rule Gallery. Her work resides in the collection of the Chicago Ritz Carlton and in private collections across the United States. Rachel is a graduate of Brown University and The Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Rachel lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband and two children.

 

 

artist statement.

My work explores how light, material, and repetition create spaces for perception, memory, and emotional resonance. Across media, I build quiet structures that ask to be seen slowly. Whether folded, layered, built, or gilded, each form invites a kind of inwardness: a turn toward breath, toward stillness, toward what’s held but rarely spoken.

Light is a constant throughline in my practice. In some works, it skims the surface, revealing rhythm through subtle variation. In others, it is reflected or absorbed, deepening our perception of space. Sometimes it emanates from within, held in reflective chambers that glow softly from the inside out. These forms become interior architectures—spaces shaped not only by physical materials but by attention, grief, tenderness, and time.

Repetition plays a central role. I return to familiar forms and gestures not to reproduce them, but to listen more closely. Each fold, curve, or hollow becomes part of a larger structure of care. The work is often ambiguous in scale and reference. It might echo landscape or body, breath or terrain, vessel or reliquary. This ambiguity creates room for the viewer to bring their own presence into the piece.

Whether working in relief or in three dimensions, I am interested in how materials hold tension and softness at once. How form can become a sanctuary. And how what we carry—loss, love, time—can be given shape, if only for a moment.

CV.