A ‘Meet the Artist’ event with Rachael Johnson has taken place in the Townhall in Enniskillen, with visitors being able to meet the Fermanagh native and get an insight into her work.

Nineteen pieces of Rachael’s mixed media collage paintings are currently on display.

As part of the event, which was organised by Fermanagh and Omagh District Council, Rachael explained the techniques she uses and how she is inspired by local landscapes, bogs and shore lines, to create her inscapes.

Starting off proceedings, Rachael’s husband, poet and radio presenter Frank Rafferty talked about her work.

He said: “There is something of the bog and shore that haunts. The sweep of fractured scarp and tilted seam of fossiled stone, brackish fern and peat moss, soft rush sward and the slow seep of dank bog pools resonate with archetypal curve and hue, making a familiar of these primal wetlands.
“Recalled from sensory memory, these are inscapes, and they are inhabited.”
Rachael studied painting and printmaking at Canterbury College of Art and Design and completed her Fine Arts Degree in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
She travelled extensively worldwide before returning to Ireland in 1991 to work as an Artist in Residence in Dublin.
She is currently based in Derry/Londonderry, where she is a registered Art Psychotherapist, but continues to spend much of her free time painting in the studio of her late father, Gordon Johnson, in Enniskillen.
Several of her works were chosen for the International Art Expo in Riccioni, Italy and she was invited to show a selection of paintings in the Castle Coole National Trust Gallery in April last year.
Speaking about her work, Rachael explained how different people see different things in her compositions and she tends to give her work general, single word titles and allows the viewer to have their own interpretation of her work. 
She went on to explain about the creative materials she uses in the execution of her work, including found objects. 
Speaking at the ‘Meet the Artist’ event, Rachael said she liked to ‘bring a piece of ancient bog oak to the stones, volcanic sand to the beach, tribal brocade to the settlements, driftwood to the jetty, glass and crystal to the quarry, bone to the sea and metal to the shrines’.
Her work will be on display at the Townhall until the end of this July.