RACHY MCEWAN


Rachy McEwan is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in London. In 2020, she graduated with First Class Honors in a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting and Printmaking from The Glasgow School of Art, where she was awarded the RSA New Contemporaries Award. More recently, she completed a Master's in Material Futures at UAL: Central Saint Martins with Distinction and was shortlisted for the Maison/0 LVMH Maison Award.

Rachy challenges traditional approaches to human perception through her work, which explores the interconnections between technology and environmental, political, and societal issues. By bridging the natural, artificial, and non-human worlds, she collaborates across disciplines such as engineering, arboriculture, and science to reshape our relationships with the land and more-than-human entities.

Her research and techno-sensual artistic practices foster new cognition and machine-learning dialogues. She introduces innovative concepts like the sensorial ecology of intelligence, the machine microbiome, machine ecosystems, and biological machines.




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WIP

Xylophobia-Dendrophilia, a current WIP, constitutes a web-based experimental game interface that expands Money Trees—a 2024 digital platform hosting arboreal assets tied to physical tree preservation. Users invest in virtual trees, with proceeds allocated to the maintenance, care, and replanting of corresponding real-world specimens. Upon scanning a tree-specific QR code, participants access an interactive Three.js-generated map hosted via the Glitch platform. This dynamic environment synthesises real-time ecological data from Google’s i-Tree API to produce a continuously evolving arboreal landscape.

The central component of this procedurally generated environment is a virtual landscape comprising 3D photogrammetric scans of London’s urban trees. Artistic development involves applying 2D UV map textures derived from photogrammetric scans to 3D models, creating a stylised interplay between digital abstraction and ecological fidelity. Through this ludic framework, users are invited to contemplate human-environment interdependencies within contexts of accelerated ecological transformation.


SAATCHI GALLERY - MONEY TREES AR

Money Trees, Save Me is an Augmented Reality of a digital tree asset created by visitors via the Money Trees website.

 
            2024



MONEY TREES

Money Trees aims to increase the value and autonomy of urban trees in London, reducing the likelihood of their removal. By utilising community art, activism and technology to transform how we economically value trees, reducing the chances of them being cut down. 



2024


REVELATION

Revelation is an interactive installation whose purpose is to show the impact of specific datasets on an AI. This installation takes place as a confessionary where you can talk with God. The Revelations God is an AI that was trained on a confined dataset; the Bible. The process consisted of fine-tuning a neural network originally developed by Open.AI.

2023


DON’T FUCK WITH TREES

Don’t Fuck with Trees tells a story rooted in research-based artwork, aiming to transcend fixed outcomes while exploring the complexities inherent in speculative domains. The London Plane, the protagonist, is a tree that fell in Soho Square, London—an emblematic focal point for analysis—succumbing to root rot and raising critical questions about the entanglement of climate change within our ecological systems. 
                     
2023


SITUATED KNOWLEDGES

Situated Knowledges: Organism, Plantationocene, Biopolitics is a multidisciplinary and multimedia body of research-based artwork. Terrains and infrastructures across Scotland are mapped and viewed through a semi-fictional lens to actively engage with ecological and technological perspectives and issues

2023

RSA NEW CONTEMPORARIES

Working with a range of media that provokes all senses - visual, auditory and olfaction - Rachy juxtaposes the natural environment with man-made worlds - fusing multi-sensory experiences with synthetic and evolutionary biology to form bio-fictional landscapes. Investigating the artificial and natural systems that question the contemporaneous and intimate relationships between nature, the body and technology and their co-existence within environmental disturbance. 
                     
2022


WHEN WE HAVE NEVER BEEN HUMAN,
WHAT HAS TO BE DONE?

When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done? conceptually blurs the boundaries between nature and technology, with an emphasis on investigating and depicting the perceived dissonance between natural and artificial organisms and systems.The work is largely grounded in objective research but is equally aware of its subjective interpretations and similarly contemplates those of the viewer.



2021

THE ART OF LIVING ON A DAMAGED PLANET

The Art of Living on a Damaged Planet explores the dissonance between the aesthetic value of consumer products and the environmental damage their production causes. It rethinks our relationship with desirable goods, highlighting the superficiality of consumerism within a capitalist framework and the environmental harm caused by waste.
2020