Wai-O-Tapu

Paint pouring, resin and mixed media · 100 x 75cm · framed

Wai-O-Tapu, on New Zealand's North Island, takes its name from the Māori for "sacred waters", and it's easy to see why. It's a landscape of bubbling pools, steaming vents and ground stained in colours you'd hardly believe were natural. Rachel was drawn less to the views than to the surfaces underfoot: the crusts, cracks and mineral deposits that form around the geothermal pools.

This painting is built from those textures. Across the top, smooth plates of sulphur yellow and soft ochre are split by fine cracks, like dried mud baked by the heat below. Raised clusters of rust, copper and charcoal sit on the surface like mineral crust, so rough and sculptural you'll want to touch them. Lower down, the colour breaks into a lacy web of burnt orange, white and lime, like a hot pool fizzing and spilling over its edges.

To capture such different surfaces, Rachel combined two techniques. Paint pouring creates the lacy, cell-like patterns, where the colours run and separate just as minerals do in the hot pools. Resin brings the smooth, glassy areas, and it demands careful planning: it gives her just four minutes before it sets as hard as rock, so every colour and every pour had to be decided in advance. For Rachel, pouring is one more way of making marks alongside her drawing and painting, never a trick on its own, and here it's used with real purpose.

It's earthy and warm, a painting that rewards a close look and then keeps giving you something new to find. Framed and ready to hang, it would suit a living room, a dining room, or any space with natural wood and warm tones.