Through hand-drawn landscapes, Rachel Wolfson Smith explores the messy and beautiful cycles of growth inherent to 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, dense foliage may blur into domestic ornament, and a field of grass may also become a bedroom. In these subtle 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 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 the creating a constructed one.