Rachelle Wunderink is an interdisciplinary artist who recently finished her Masters of Fine Art at York University, where she was awarded The Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, (SSHRC) for her thesis exhibition “That Thing: Confronting Difficult Trauma”. Her interests take her through a variety of motifs dealing with trauma, affect theory, and the femme experience. While traditionally a painter, her work diverges from this discipline as she explores video, installation and collage as a means to convey the affect of trauma. 

Wunderink’s body of work looks at the implication of gender through the lenses of intersectional feminism, queer theory, and motherhood. Her earlier work reflects upon her experiences as a female flâneur, where she used a collection of found materials gathered over a decade of working and traveling around the world. Her MFA Thesis explored antagonistic relational aesthetics focused on sexual assault trauma. More recently her work explores the loss of identity when becoming a mother. These works are autobiographical while still maintaining an understanding of the current political body. 

Wunderink’s formal technique when approaching a new body of work integrates the deconstruction, repetition, and copying of found materials. She uses the destruction/ replication of objects to create a new form, highlighting its appropriation. The overlapping of materials signifies the importance that these objects hold while often abstracting their true meaning. This allows her audience to explore the artist’s intent behind the remixing of these materials.