Through hand-drawn landscapes, Rachel Wolfson Smith explores the messy and beautiful cycles of growth inherent to nature and the female experience.

Raised on a small farm by naturalist parents who also ran a landscaping company, Smith observed simultaneous efforts to control nature and keep it wild. That tension lives at the center of her work. Her drawings look back to landscape histories, domestic floral motifs, rogue plants pushing up through city sidewalks, and botanical patterns woven into textiles. Pulling from all of it equally, her work may reveal flowers blurring into domestic ornament, tangles of vines reflecting internal chaos, or fields of grass that are also bedrooms. In these subtle imagined landscapes, nature and people are always collaborating.

Smith’s work questions how our curated versions of nature can become mirrors to our own inner worlds. Her expressive mark-making acts out control and letting it go. Anchored in realism, her imagery has softened through motherhood, now dissolving at its edges into pattern, light, or color. The emotional landscape emerges from creating a constructed one.