Rachel Maclean RSA (Elect) is a multi-media artist. Using film, sculpture, printmaking and photography, she creates outlandish characters and fantasy worlds which she uses to delve into politics, society and identity.
Maclean has rapidly established herself as one of the most distinctive creative voices in the UK by creating baroque, hyper-real worlds using green-screen video technology and computer animation. Playing many of the extravagantly costumed characters herself, Maclean spins fables that combine comedy and horror.
Working at the forefront of art making in the digital age, Maclean’s multidisciplinary practice uses emerging technologies to explore ideas of power and identity. Her most recent body of work They’ve Got Your Eyes draws parallels between today’s AI boom and the Fairy Mania that emerged during the Victorian era. The work explores the contradictory ways we think and talk about AI: from dismissing its output as generative ‘slop’ to an almost religious devotion to its intelligence and capabilities. Maclean is interested in what these extremes reveal about our hopes and fears around AI technology and the human fantasies of power that drive its development.
Exhibited in This 26, In The Style Pelicliar interrogates this tension between what AI is - a system of pattern-recognising algorithms - and what it feels like to interact with it. It draws parallels between contemporary AI and the Victorian microscope boom, during which technological advances in microscopy are said to have contributed to a renewed belief in pre-modern fairy worlds. The discovery of previously unseen forms of microscopic life expanded the boundaries of what could be understood as real, opening up the possibility that fairies, too, might actually exist. Elaborate fairy paintings by Scottish artist Joseph Noel Paton provide a historical reference point for Maclean’s exploration of our contemporary machine revolution.
To produce the work, Maclean trained AI models on her face and back catalogue of work, resulting in the unsettling reproduction of her likeness. The ornate 3D-printed frame evokes Victorian decorative traditions, whilst bearing the amorphous glitches of its AI translation.
In The Style Pelicliar was commissioned by Josh Lilley Gallery and is part of a larger body of work centred around Maclean’s new film They’ve Got Your Eyes, showing in Glasgow as part of SONICA from 12 September - 25 October.
Taking part in RSA New Contemporaries in 2010 came at a really formative point in my career. I showed my Scottish themed video work that had been part of my degree show at Edinburgh College of Art the previous year: Tae Think Again and Tale as Old as Time. It was really exciting to meet lots of graduates from other colleges. Through those connection I went on to be involved with various artist run things going on across the country and developed lasting relationships. It doesn’t feel like sixteen years ago!
It was an exciting moment to be a young artist in Scotland, there was a lot of time given to emerging practices, as well as opportunities to try stuff out and make mistakes. I think it’s rarer than you’d think for a country to give over one of its most prestigious venues, a big grand Playfair building bang in the centre of Edinburgh, to graduate artists. There is a symbolic value in that, it validates risk taking and gives you a sense that even at a young age, your ideas are taken seriously. It gave me lots of confidence ongoing in my work and in the face of all the challenges you encounter when you graduate, encouragement not to give up!
