We recently connected with Rachael Speirs and have shared our conversation below.

Rachael, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s jump back to the first dollar you earned as a creative? What can you share with us about how it happened?

The first time I showed art was about 11-12 years ago. I had been accepted to the Queen West Art Crawl in Toronto and I had never shown my artwork before. The show was an outdoor art fair and within 30 minutes of setting up my booth I had sold several pieces. I was in shock and decided there must be something to this. I have pursued my art career since then, whether its shifted from full time to part-time and back again, it has remained constant.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Sure! My name is Rachael Speirs and I am artist from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I am a self-taught artist and my medium is mainly scrap fabric, embroidery, paper and gouache on canvas. My pieces are highly textural and highly narrative and often contain metaphors for life experience or thought processes. I typically make large scale paintings behind glass. The work is full of delicate texture and threads and layers and layers of paper and fabric. I explore how we see and interpret the world and weave a commentary on the roles of women. This is partially influenced by an upbringing immersed in imagination and storytelling and also influenced by my education and background in social work.

I have been working in my style of art since I was a child. I stole scraps of fabric from my moms sewing basket and make artwork with them. I have been working in a very distinct type of craft for a long time and my style is very specific.

I love to create narrative works and I also welcome commissions that examine family history.

I am also an author and illustrator and am in the process of working with a publisher on my first children’s book.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Resilience is a topic of interest for me. I love the idea of continuing to return to something, over and over. Pressing on through an uphill battle of sorts. I think my resilience has come through the fact that I continuously return to art. I lean into it as a place of personal enrichment and a method of communicating with my subconscious. Often I am working on a piece, I step away and live my life and then return to the work and realize it was communicating something that I was hiding in my subconscious.
The resiliency is that as hard as it can be sometimes, I keep coming back. I find new ways of approaching the art and I use the challenges that come with the artistic process, and the challenges that come with being an artist, as an opportunity to shift my perspective and grow.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I had to unlearn in my artistic journey (and life journey for that matter), is that a creative career is not a linear path. It is full of shifts and twists and turns. The line will move and skyrocket and will be followed by a dip or slump. You will feel like you are moving backwards at times. At other times the line will stop entirely.

The backstory of this lesson is simple naivety and the youthful dream that something magical happens to change your life forever, like a fairy tale. The reality is that we are a culmination of many small but important moments.
Each exhibition, each inquiry, each introduction or connection you make is woven into a quilt of importance.
Do not dismiss anyone. Everyone who engages with your work in some way is important.

There is no one exhibition or show that will change an art career and send it on an upward trajectory. Its all a collection of little moments that build and condense to become a whole story. But if you are authentic and have your own creative voice, it will be a rich and rewarding experience.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.rachaelspeirs.com
• Instagram: @rachaelspeirsart

Image Credits
Rachael Speirs