Rachel Goebel is a multidisciplinary artist based in Des Moines, Iowa,

working across painting, writing, installation, and socially engaged

practice.

Her work explores how internal states spill into the external, and how

incremental shifts shape systems. She received a BFA in painting and

printmaking from Iowa State University, with a minor in English.

Over the following decade, her practice expanded beyond the studio

into systems-based work in software development and facilitation.

This experience informs her sensitivity to group dynamics, attention,

and the unspoken.

Her work is grounded in interconnectedness—felt, practiced, and often

strained—shaped by attention to the body, land, and subtle shifts in

perception.

She has exhibited work throughout Iowa and recently returned

to an active studio practice alongside public-facing projects, including

One Billion Acts of Kindness; One Million Acts of Resistance.

Her current work, Imperfectly Held, brings painting, writing, sculpture

and sound into dialogue, explore how a life is carried, unevenly, through

rupture and transformation. Material traces remain visible: ink spatters,

erasures, shifts in tone. These gestures record the limits of control and

the persistence of process.

At the center, a suspended net holds abstracted forms compressed,

supported, and bound within the same structure.

It holds,

but not completely,

and not without consequence.

The work does not resolve what it contains.

It creates conditions for noticing.