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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RSA NEW CONTEMPORIES 2022
https://www.royalscottishacademy.org/content/feature/308/artworks-9550-rachy-mcewan-modern-synthesis-2021/ 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. She confronts the confusion in the concept of identity and forces us to question where one organism stops and another begins.
Utilising bio-politics of the senses, Rachy challenges traditional approaches to the human sensorium, emphasising olfaction as well as microbial and embodied intelligence. Through her research and technological and sensual artistic exploration, Rachy is opening new discourse in the realms of cognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning, introducing concepts of the sensorial ecology of intelligence, the machine microbiome, machine ecosystems, and biological machines. Maintaining a practice focused on co-subjectivity, Rachy’s projects include collaborations with engineers, synthetic and microbiologists, computer scientists, perfumers, bacteria, fungus and lichens.