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

Raised on a small farm by naturalist parents who also ran a landscaping company, Smith grew up watching simultaneous efforts to control nature and keep it wild. That tension lives at the center of her work. Her drawings look back to landscape origin and development histories, to domestic floral motifs, to the rogue plants pushing up through city sidewalks and botanical patterns woven into textiles, pulling from all of it equally. Dense foliage blurs into domestic ornament; a field of grass can also be a bed. In these imagined landscapes, nature and people are always collaborating.

Smith’s work questions how our curated versions of nature become mirrors of our inner worlds. Her expressive mark-making enacts exactly this: the control and the release of it. Anchored in realism, her imagery has softened through motherhood, now dissolving at its edges into pattern, light, or color. The emotional landscape emerges from the constructed one.