Rebecca’s work is about maintaining a tradition of ethnographic and natural history illustration, based on careful observational drawing as a way of seeing, recording, investigating and analyzing. She is interested in how the use of drawings by social anthropologists and museum curators has helped in the description and analysis of artefacts, what it means to produce new images, and what informs the ethnographic artist in the twenty-first century. During her time at the Royal College of Art she worked mainly in watercolour, drawing bird skins at the Natural History Museum and ethnographic artefacts made from feathers at the British Museum. Her interest in feather artefacts stems from a year spent living in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (in 1982) and subsequently studying social anthropology at Cambridge University. Her research was also specifically on how images of endangered birds can help with their conservation.
Rebecca is currently Artist in residence at the British Museum, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. She is part of a research group working on the relatively little-known Melanesian collections. The research for her drawings and paintings is mainly done at the museum ethnography stores in Shoreditch. There are approximately 130,000 artefacts from Oceania housed in the stores, their scope is both contemporary and historical, but the bulk of the material was acquired in the 19th and 20th centuries and largely dates from this time.
Rebecca’s work is about exploring the shared histories between the people that made the artefacts, the explorers, anthropologists and travelers that obtained them and the museum that now houses them. In storage the object is numbered, labeled, catalogued, photographed and measured; yet its aesthetic qualities can still be appreciated.