Originally from the UK Rachel Milne is a professional fine art painter based in Newcastle, NSW. Specialising in figurative and observational oil painting, in the style of the impressionists, mainly focusing on the genre of intimism. Before leaving the UK Rachel exhibited regularly with the Royal West of England Academy and is now represented by the King Street Gallery on William, Sydney and the Sophie Gannon Gallery in Melbourne. Locally Milne has completed residencies in the old David Jones building, a boarded up theatre from the 1900s, an industrial shed and textiles factory. She is no stranger to depicting places that are about to go under great transformation, or slip into nothing.
Rachel Milne
"My idea is to create a body of work that I would hope would demonstrate the humanity and history of Liddell, a documentary exercise of pulling the beauty out of the building, to show it again in a new light"
Approach
Milne found the the LiddellWORKS project incredibly exciting from the start. Having always been interested in buildings in the process of change- of capturing that moment before they are demolished or repurposed. The Liddell Power Station has had such an enormous impact on the Hunter Region both in terms of supplying power to people’s homes and also in the sense of community it offered to the hundreds of people who worked there over the years. It was also the scale of the place and the project that was so appealing, this huge battery, purely build for function but in actuality so beautiful in terms of shape, colour and tone. She was ready to take on the creative challenge of trying to put across the beauty she saw. Since starting the project Milne has cemented her interest in industrial interiors and the process of putting love of these spaces across to the viewer. She also muses "to be an artist in a space that was never intended for art is just so exciting". Milne's test now is to create something that does the space, and the emotions it evokes, justice.
My Journey
