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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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.