Rebecca Garrard - MA Painting
A phenomenology of embodied intuition
Rebecca Garrard is a Manchester-based artist whose intuitive, meditative practice explores the phenomenology of embodied intuition. A graduate in Philosophy and Italian from the University of Exeter, she is graduating this year from an MA in Painting at Manchester School of Art. Garrard’s ink paintings and charcoal drawings emerge from a state she describes as “emptiness” – a relinquishing of ego, theory, and intellectual over-determination in favour of flow, play, and felt experience.
Working with acrylic ink, watercolour, and black gesso on paper, her paintings are fluid, abstract, and often monochrome or delicately toned, evoking breath, energy, and the somatic. Inspired by Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Krishnamurti, and Japanese aesthetics, Garrard uses ink as a vehicle for accessing what she calls the “mind-body-spirit connection.” Her works register movement and sensation more than image, becoming traces of embodied attention.
Working with willow charcoal on paper, her large-scale drawings are another access point for physical intelligence and embodied intuition. This way of working redefines drawing, not as picture-making, but as an actualisation of embodied knowledge. Through intuitive mark-making and modalities of self-connection, these works explore the experience of consciousness, awareness, emptiness, embodied intuition, flow, self, Zen, enlightenment, unity, reality, and the Tao.
For Garrard, art-making is not about assertion, but attunement – a way to witness inner states and resist conditioned habits of seeing. Her work invites slow looking and rewards presence over interpretation.
