Rachel Rimell is an award-winning lens-based artist based in Malton, North Yorkshire. Her practice examines human kinship with the land, the sea and the sky. She explores how connection, estrangement and impermanence shape our relationship with the natural world. Grounded in questions of perception, memory and transience, her work considers how individual experience influences our sense of belonging within wider ecological systems.

Trained as a photojournalist, Rachel continues to undertake commissioned work alongside her conceptual practice. She works across digital and experimental analogue photography, performance, moving image and sound. In recent years, her approach has become increasingly interdisciplinary and performative, creating space for embodied experience and sensory engagement.

Rachel previously worked as Chief Press Officer to the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser on climate change at DEFRA. Working closely with climate scientists on public-facing research and policy to communicate climate science to wide audiences revealed the tension between long-term environmental responsibility and short-term political and economic priorities. The experience exposed the challenge of fostering care for a natural world that many people feel increasingly disconnected from, and how difficult it is to reconnect to a space we primarily view as an abstract resource rather than a lived environment. This continues to underpin her artistic inquiry, informing her focus on lived connection to place.

Rachel holds an MA in Photography with Distinction from Falmouth University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She was a winner of Portrait of Britain (2020) and a finalist in The Guardian’s Women Behind the Lens. She has also been shortlisted for RPS IPE165, Belfast Photo Festival (2022), and Photo North Emerging Artist (2023). Her work has been published in Stir The Pot, Portrait of Britain Vol. 3, and Rankin’s This Is Britain, and featured in Source Magazine, The Guardian, Vogue Italia, and the BBC.

Recent solo exhibitions include Terra Incognita: On This Land | In This Land | Of This Land (Dalby Forest); A Solitude of Being (Ryedale Film&Photo Fest 2026); Traces (Helmsley Arts Centre); The Handworkers (Ryedale Folk Museum); and Lies a Calm Along the Deep (Dalby Forest). Group exhibitions include How Pleasant To Go To A Friend On A Visit (Humber Street Gallery); The River Project (Dalby Forest); the RPS Summer Show (2023); Format 23 as part of Performing the Photobook; and Transmutation curated by Melanie King at Margate School.

Rachel also lectures in photography at York College & University Centre and is the founder, curator and artistic director for Ryedale Film&Photo Fest.

Alongside her creative practice, Rachel accepts commissions for editorial, portraits, business branding, products.