Rachael Clewlow

Tees Colour Register is a vinyl artwork that brings the colours of the Tees Valley into Middlesbrough railway station. Throughout February 2024, Rachael made a series of train journeys across the Tees Valley and beyond. 

From Bishop Auckland to Saltburn, Whitby to Hartlepool, the region was explored and documented from the perspective of its rail network, with Middlesbrough at its centre.

The artwork takes each of these moments and presents them within a single, expansive, stratified flash of colour that spans the full length of the railway station. The collected colours and their descriptions reflect the rich and ever-changing character of the landscape that makes up our region – from heavy industry and suburban sprawl to green moorland and coastal areas. 

Each of the 492 coloured bands within the artwork, reflects a specific point in Rachael’s journey and a moment in time.

Rachael Clewlow is best-known for her highly intricate and detailed paintings. Her work follows a tradition of reductive abstract painting, informed by the language of cartographic design but shaped by her love of colour. It is a reimagined form of landscape painting, which evokes the memory of a place or a journey via colours derived from her real-life experience of it.

www.axisweb.org/artist/rachaelclewlow