Rachel Kice is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, writing, installation, and performance. Her work grows out of encounters with environment and lived experience, and explores what we try to keep, what we bury, and how all of it changes us.

Her studio is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and her practice continues through fieldwork in the Pike National Forest near Lake George, Colorado, and in other landscapes where she creates in collaboration with the environment.

Since 2024, she has been developing Shapes of Earth, a series of abstract paintings and objects made in dialogue with her novel-in-progress. Many of the works are created on the forest floor using soil, snow, and found materials. The series began as an experiment: to write a protagonist who painted differently than she did. To understand the character, Kice began painting as the character might—and over time the boundary between fiction and self dissolved. The paintings and the story now evolve together. Alongside this work she is developing installation and conceptual projects that extend the themes of the series.

Kice first gained recognition for her expressive live-painting performances with Nashville’s artist collective MuzikMafia, sharing the stage with Big & Rich, Gretchen Wilson, and other major American musicians. Her paintings are included in public and private collections such as the Tennessee State Museum, Warner Brothers, Sony, Berklee College of Music, and CAA. She has collaborated with organizations including TEDx, MusiCares, Emerson University’s Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, and Crocs/Hey Dude.

In 2021 her Oracle of Associated Light—a card deck and guidebook based on abstract word paintings—was selected as a Kickstarter “Project We Love,” bridging her visual and literary work and offering a tool for creative reflection and lateral thinking.

Kice shares her process through short-form videos on Instagram (@rachelkice), documenting experiments, fieldwork, and the evolving relationship between art, place, and story.