Rachel Hetherington graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art. She works across disciplines with a focus on video, installation, sculpture, and performance to camera. Cardboard is her signature material, used to create sculptures, sets, and props. These pieces appear both sculpturally within the gallery space and in her short films to create distinct interconnected layers.
A 2D Girl in a 3D World is a mixed media work combining short film and sculpture that examines Hetherington's experience with adulthood. Through the aesthetics of mid 2000's chunky, brightly coloured plastic toys she examines a state of arrested development that followed her unsettled late teens. She presents a miniaturised version of herself, digitally imprisoned within a cardboard dream house. As a character in a video game, her options are limited to a set of buttons and her control is relinquished. In this restrictive space she illustrates the unexpectedly mundane reality of adult life. A life which, as a suicidal teenager, she never believed she would live to see.
