RACHY MCEWAN
Rachy McEwan is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in London. She graduated with a First Class BA in Painting and Printmaking from The Glasgow School of Art (2020), receiving the RSA New Contemporaries Award, and earned a Distinction in her MA in Material Futures at UAL: Central Saint Martins (2024), where she was shortlisted for the Maison/0 LVMH Maison Award.
Her practice combines art and technology to create systems and experiences exploring urban ecology, interactivity, and the ways audiences engage with both digital and physical environments. Working across painting, programming, 3D imaging, and interactive design, she develops experimental platforms that encourage reflection on human-environment relationships, technological processes, and participatory engagement.
Rachy challenges traditional approaches to perception, bridging natural, artificial, and non-human worlds. Collaborating across disciplines including engineering, arboriculture, and science, her work blends technical experimentation with conceptual inquiry, offering new ways to understand and interact with contemporary ecological, technological, and urban systems.
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TREE-GOTCHI: SYLVAN
The tree-gotchi is a futuristic Tamagotchi-inspired device that links directly to real trees in London, using soil sensors to monitor their health. When a tree needs water, its virtual counterpart—a pixelated tree creature—alerts the user with animations.
2025
DARK BUT DENROPHILIA
Dark but Dendrophilia, a current WIP, is a web-based experimental game interface that expands Money Trees,a digital platform hosting arboreal assets tied to physical tree preservation. Through Dark but Dendrophilia, participants access an interactive Three.js-generated map. This hosts an environment synthesising real-time ecological data to produce a continuously evolving arboreal landscape.
2025
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