In her figurative acrylic paintings, Rachel Corn-Hicks explores childhood, fantasy, and emotional labor as overlapping psychological terrains.
Rachel Corn-Hicks is a contemporary painter whose figurative works use surreal childhood imagery to explore emotional labor, vulnerability, and the hidden costs of care.
The Migration aka The Perks Of Being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (2023), Soft Candy Center (2022), and A Little Help From My Friends (2022) present dreamlike domestic and natural scenes where innocence is undercut by unease. Corn-Hicks uses bright color, storybook compositions, and surreal symbolism to examine how care, expectation, and vulnerability are learned early, and often unevenly distributed.
The Migration aka The Perks Of Being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Rachel Corn-Hicks, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16 in. / 50.8 x 40.64 cm.
This painting stages a charged domestic moment beneath a cascade of monarch butterflies. A young girl cuts into her own torso as butterflies spill outward, blending self-harm imagery with metamorphosis. The title’s reference to the “manic pixie dream girl” trope reframes emotional generosity as extraction, beauty and wonder produced at personal cost. Corn-Hicks’ clean lines and saturated palette soften the scene visually, heightening the discomfort of its implication. The butterflies function both as symbols of transformation and as evidence of what is taken when a person is expected to endlessly inspire others.
Soft Candy Center, Rachel Corn-Hicks, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 in. / 30.48 x 30.48 cm.
In Soft Candy Center, a blue deer wanders through a pastel forest, marked by an exposed wound glowing against its body. The animal’s stylized form and gentle posture evoke vulnerability rather than violence. Corn-Hicks places harm within a fairytale setting, suggesting how pain can be normalized, or even aestheticized, when wrapped in softness. The layered background, filled with rhythmic trees and floating leaves, creates a sense of calm that contrasts with the exposed injury. The painting becomes a meditation on sensitivity as both strength and liability.
A Little Help From My Friends, Rachel Corn-Hicks, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16 in. / 50.8 x 40.64 cm.
This work depicts children playing on a seesaw beneath a rope swing tied to a tree, suspended in a pastel landscape streaked with dripping clouds. The scene appears playful at first, but imbalance quickly emerges, one child hangs alone while others struggle to compensate. Corn-Hicks uses childhood play as metaphor for cooperation, dependence, and inequity. The tilted structure and exaggerated perspective reinforce instability, while the soft, candy-colored atmosphere suggests how early lessons about responsibility and care are absorbed without question.
Across these paintings, Rachel Corn-Hicks constructs worlds where sweetness and strain coexist. Childhood fantasy becomes a lens for examining emotional labor, gendered expectation, and the quiet costs of being gentle in systems that demand constant giving. By pairing whimsical imagery with moments of rupture, Corn-Hicks reveals how mythologies of innocence can mask deeper imbalances, ones learned early and carried forward.