Rachel Howard

The series ultimately offers an investigation into the aesthetics of suicide. Possible instruments of death are depicted – a pair of scissors, a ladder, as well as the symbolic, lone Black Dog (a common metaphor for depression, coined by 18th Century writer Samuel Johnson). Then there are the faceless figures; many hang from ropes, while the body of a woman lying across a bed recalls the psychosexual claustrophobia of Walter Sickert.

While Howard's fourteen paintings reference The Passion, the creation of the series was in fact provoked by one of the most shocking photographs to emerge from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Detainees routinely endured torture and humiliation at the hands of American military personnel, as exposed through the media. The particular image was of a prisoner standing on a box, hooded and wired with electrodes; thus the box becomes the modern day equivalent of the Cross – a tool of humiliation and torment. Thus, the paintings offer a broader commentary on the universality of human rights abuses and people's capability for cruelty towards each other. A publication accompanies the work with texts by art historian and curator Joachim Pissarro and Shami Chakrabarti.

It is this idea of limitlessness that Howard seeks to engage with, the belief that human suffering is never-ending, hence the name of the work – Repetition is Truth.

One enters a room with fourteen Stations of the Cross by Rachel Howard – her Via Dolorosa. Monumental, quiet, graceful, discrete, luscious, restrained and yet, at the same time, forceful, masterful, deafening – these paintings yield more layers of emotions than one can absorb all at once.

In 2008 Howard designed the front cover for The Big Issue newspaper.

Howard's Suicide Paintings were first shown at the Bohen Foundation in New york, 2007, and were later exhibited at Haunch of Venison, London, 2008 The series evolved after an acquaintance of Howard's committed suicide. He was discovered, not in the imagined drama, 'swinging from the rafters', but kneeling in a pose almost of prayer. It was this particular detail that Howard found most disturbing, and which led her to create the series, coupled with the fact that for her, suicide is one of the last taboos. The source material for the paintings came from trawling through forensic magazines and internet sites for pictures of suicides. These were then abstracted from their contexts within Howard's rapidly executed line drawings, forming the basis of the paintings.

Between 2005–2009 Howard worked on her first commission, titled Repetition is Truth - Via Dolorosa. Via Dolorosa, Latin for 'Way of Suffering', is the name of a street within the Old City of Jerusalem, believed to be the path that Jesus walked, bearing the cross, towards his crucifixion. It is also another name for the fourteen Stations of the Cross, which depict these final hours of his life – The Passion.

Howard's Sin Paintings comprise seven monumental canvases, each painted in a range of intensely saturated reds, offset by the use of bright yellow and orange. The paintings were exhibited in a solo exhibition entitled Guilty, at the Bohen Foundation, New York in 2003. The paintings have a glossy, mirror-shine surface, through which a simple cruciform shape emerges. They do differ from one another; Pride is an offering of brilliant red down-strokes, with a cross discernible in its centre; the reds of Envy are more individuated, with yellows breaking through here and there, and the cross far less readable; the hues of Anger are in a darker, more brooding range.

While Howard more recently employs oil paint, from 1995–2008 she primarily used household paint

In 1992, Howard was awarded the Prince's Trust Award to support her art practice. She received the British Council Award in 2008, and in 2004 was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize.

Howard graduated from Goldsmiths College, London, in 1991.