About Rachel Phillips

"Make me a willow cabin at your gate, and call upon my soul within the house."

Twelfth Night, Shakespeare

About Field Notes

Certainly, home is a place.  It is also a place of mind.  For the spirit too, home offers familiarity and solace, shelter and rest.  Yet a house is not for hiding from the world; it has windows, and doors to enter but also leave by.  As a girl, I adored the Wind in the Willows where homes were in and of the landscape—built underground, along the riverbank, and in the woods.  A place where you can be still, letting the world come to you, watching birds fly by.

This series of photographs blends the domesticity of home with the joy of wilderness, the natural world.  The paper houses are built from letters, postcards and envelopes saved through the decades in old shoeboxes by my grandparents and discovered in their attic a few years ago.  The images are printed on old envelopes collected from around the world; artifacts from the last centuries.  What did the envelopes contain?  Where did they come from?  In whose mailbox were they delivered?  What stories do they tell?

About The Printing Process

The images in this series of paper houses in the landscape begin as black & white medium-format film negatives scanned for digital printing.

Each image is then sized to fit its envelope using digital imaging software and printed with archival pigment inks onto a specially coated clear plastic transfer (like transparency) film.

Next, a mixture of distilled water and alcohol is applied to the envelope.  The transparency film with the printed image is hand applied to the wet envelope—right over the stamps and writing—and is rubbed to ensure good contact.  After a few minutes, the transfer film is carefully pulled off, leaving the ink transferred onto the envelope.

Finally, a coat of artists' wax is applied to the envelope with a soft cloth to protect the surface of the transfer and enhance the colors in the envelope.

All steps are completed by the artist.