Each medium is chosen because it can say something the others can't.

RA Brooks has been making figures since she was seventeen, when a series of nude studies won Best of Show at her first exhibition, then were quietly moved to the interior of the gallery out of Midwest modesty. That early tension, between what a body holds and what a room will allow, has never fully left her work.

Each collection draws from a different period or experience: not one fixed source, but a practice that keeps returning to what has been felt and partially lost.

Her practice moves fluidly across materials: charcoal, acrylic, watercolor, textile. The medium is chosen for what it can say, not out of habit. Her work exists along a spectrum: figures observed from life, abstracted until what remains is emotional rather than anatomical.