Cultivating creativity with Rachel Harbour By Fiona Campbell
When I first took an Fine Arts
art workshop with Rachel Harbour, I was struck, perhaps enchanted, with her delight around creating and teaching. She inspires joy over the making of things and cultivates a space for her student to just play. Despite being the child of two scientists, her mum a botanist, her dad a nuclear medicine physicist, there was always an appreciation for the arts: “I always painted, did watercolours and doodles… I don’t remember not having arts supplies,” she says. Then in high school she discovered the BFA program at York University and art became something she could “study and do.” Then she learned of the concurrent education program at York, and art became something she could study, do and teach.
Her background was in painting, but she decided to study sculpture and printmaking. “Most people don’t start a degree in something they don’t know… it’s a little weird,” she says. This experience fostered her curiosity about different art forms and gave her a place to just “try stuff.” “I always really loved to make things but never felt stuck in a particular box,” says Harbour. “The flattering way to refer to that is ‘versatility.’ The less flattering might be ‘indecisive,’” she says with a laugh. There is a lot of laughter when speaking with Harbour. “When I feel the need to really delve in and express something, I always go back to painting, but when I just feel like playing, that’s when it becomes anything.” Before the pandemic, Harbour offered workshops at the Belleville Public Library and from her home studio in Wooler, Ont., and her projects (like her own
Horse
portfolio) range from creating with acrylic, watercolour, wire and beads, to tile with alcohol ink, painted rocks and acrylic pouring. I tell her I admire her ability to play, try different tools and techniques, to not have an attachment to a certain result. To create for the sake of creating. She admits it took her took her a long time to get there. When her two boys (now adults) were small, she says there was an intensity to her work: “Time was so precious… maybe I had an hour, and there was this pressure that whatever I was doing it had to matter, it had to lead to something, it had to be legitimized. With a lot of work, there was a forcedness to it.” But at the same time she had a space in the kitchen called the Creative Cupboard, full of markers, stickers, crayons and glitter, and while school taught the kids structured creating, Harbour says, “art time with mum was bananas!”
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