Finished paintings propped up in the studio

Rachel's fleshy, doll-pink palette 

Well used tubes of paint in the studio

I peel off the traffic-heavy road that runs right through the centre of Wandsworth and do a double take. There, nestled at the top of an industrial estate, is a little period house – all brown brick and sash windows. I notice a sign for WIP Space Studios and realise I’ve arrived at my destination. Shooting off a text, I wait a couple of minutes until painter Rachel Hobkirk comes padding down the stairs to open the door in her socks, revealing a flight of candy-pink painted stairs behind. More familiar with the repurposed office buildings and dilapidated warehouses that typically serve as artist studios in London, I am taken aback. What is this place?

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‘It's run by an artist [Mark Nader], who lives here, and he converted it into studios,’ she tells me as I follow her up the candyfloss stairs. Rachel found the space through a friend and has been happily working here since she graduated with a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Royal Academy Schools in the summer of 2023.

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She pushes open a white painted door. Light floods in through the large windows, illuminating the large paintings stacked against the panelled walls of what was once unmistakably a domestic space. Textured wallpaper is framed within each panel and placed  around a (now covered) fireplace, above which a line of dolls sits upon the mantlepiece. 

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The dolls might be unexpected company in another artist’s studio. Here, however, their chubby cheeks and round, unblinking eyes are echoed by those featured in Rachel’s paintings. Hyperreal plastic faces fill her canvases, cropped and enlarged on a disconcertingly intimidating scale. There’s no other place to begin than by asking, ‘Why dolls?'

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‘I’ve always been interested in the trope of a doll and how that relates to memories from childhood and early teenage years,’ she explains. ‘I thought when you look at a doll that’s been discarded, or an old doll that has a creepy, uncanny quality to it, that at one point it was a cute, adorable object. But now it’s become this weird, gross thing.’ She finds an analogy with the process of entering womanhood. ‘I felt I could relate to that in terms of certain moments growing up and being a young woman,’ she continues, ‘when your own sense of self is put into question.’

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Under the unwavering gaze of the dolls on the mantelpiece, I take a seat opposite Rachel, who is curled up on a chair with one leg pulled underneath her. In admiration of the care, control and sheer skill it must take to achieve the smooth, unblemished finish of her paintings, I ask how she begins a work. ‘I always have a rough idea of composition in my head,’ she tells me, ‘but then I need a little help.’ This is when she pulls out the bag of dolls packed away in the studio cupboard in search of the perfect model, which is posed and photographed to create her source image.

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Expecting her to work from found images, I’m surprised that her paintings are based on actual dolls. Building her collection has become somewhat of an obsession, and she often finds herself rooting through charity shops and second-hand stalls in search of the latest addition to her girl gang. ‘It’s funny because you have your favourites,’ she admits with a laugh. ‘There’s this one doll that I’ve made 3 or 4 paintings of now because she looks like a little Princess Diana with the hair. And then there are some dolls that I’ve never painted.’ I wonder if they ever feel jealous and shudder at the thought of living with a cupboard-full of vengeful dolls.

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Rachel luxuriates in the imperfections she finds in the rescued dolls: dishevelled hair, a missing set of eyelashes, a porcelain-perfect face blemished by a felt-tip pen. ‘I like when there’s an object that you’re attracted to but then repulsed by at the same time,’ she explains, ‘there’s something about that push-and-pull that I think is interesting.’ These corrupt beings speak to the sense of disillusionment we so often experienced by young women when we become aware of the impossibility (or even undesirability) of the heteronormative domestic idyl fed to us through play.

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This push-and-pull extends beyond her subject matter to her conceptualisation of her hyperrealist painting style. ‘If you’re thinking about the artifice of painting and its illusionistic qualities, then leaning into that in terms of how you paint a work makes sense,’ she says. ‘The dolls are these kind of perfect objects but there’s nothing inside them. They’re dead. So it’s all about seduction and surface. And I think hyperrealism is the same. There’s this vacuousness to it that relates to the objects I’m painting.’ 

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On the other side of a solo exhibition late in 2023, Rachel has recently begun to expand her subject matter beyond her doll faces. Propped against the wall to my right is a towering image of the lower-half of a woman’s face. Teeth bared, she bites into one of the Haribo rings stacked on her manicure-tipped finger. ‘I’ve been thinking of the Haribo rings from when you’d fake propose to each other in the playground,’ she says, ‘or’, gesturing to the painting leaning against the opposite wall, ‘the aftermath of moments of play, and how maybe you’d be sticking sweets onto your dolly.’

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Our conversation turns to how Rachel spends time in the studio. Music and podcasts used to be her constant companions but recently she’s begun working more in silence. She tells me that often when she returned home from the studio, she found anxiety creeping in. ‘I was listening to a podcast about dopamine, and how if you layer too much dopamine it can lower your baseline,’ she explains. ‘So what I was finding was happening is that I was coming into the studio and the dopamine of painting and then the dopamine of listening to great music or to a podcast that I really liked and then eating all of my snacks meant that when I came home and all that would lift, I wasn’t feeling great.’

I think of interviews with pop stars who say that there was no worse feeling than coming offstage. ‘Yes,’ Rachel says, ‘I’ve heard about musicians saying they’d go and do something really banal after a big concert to ground themselves, like taking out the bins. If you’re living that high for too long, it’s not good for your mental health.’

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Despite the adjustments to her working habits, Rachel tells me how content she is in her studio. Casting my eyes around the space again before I leave, I wonder what it’s like working somewhere with so much character. ‘It’s very domestic,’ she reflects, ‘but I actually think that’s nice for my work.’ With its chandelier light fixture, panelled walls and decorative mantelpiece, it would be the perfect environment for a mini exhibition of her paintings. ‘Do you think I should?’ she asks. If I wasn’t convinced before, my final trip down the pink stairs seals the deal as I close the door of Rachel’s own little Walthamstow dolls house.

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Kitty Gurnos-Davies

26 March 2024

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Top left photo: Brynley Odu Davies. All other photos: Kitty Gurnos-Davies.