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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DARK BUT DENDROPHILIA
2024
https://xylophobia-dendrophilia.netlify.app/
Collaborator:
Steve Zafeirio
https://stevezafeiriou.com/
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.
The central component of this procedurally generated environment is a virtual landscape comprising painted 3D photogrammetric scans of London’s urban trees—many of which are under threat or have already been cut down. These scanned models function as digital archiving, preserving the memory and ecological presence of felled or endangered trees. Painted 2D UV map textures derived from photogrammetric scans are applied to 3D models, creating an interplay between digital abstraction and ecological fidelity. Users can invest in virtual trees, by purchasing their 2D painted textures, with proceeds allocated to the maintenance, care, and replanting of corresponding to the real-world trees—Making the platform both a creative and restorative ecology.
Through this framework, users are invited to contemplate human-environment interdependencies within contexts of accelerated environmental transformation.
This project is an ongoing project, where the code will be continuously updated and tree assets added. It has been recently exhibited in Amsterdam and is soon to be shown in Paris and London.