There’s no denying that our emotions, such as feelings of anger, anguish and anxiety, are caused and intensified, as we’ve explored so far within this issue, when traumatic events occur in our lives. Yet the tensity of our emotions can also be exacerbated, as a growing number of movements and Rachel demonstrates here, when questions surrounding sex, identity and society are involved. As we’ll explore, Rachel looks to evoke our emotions through a plethora of engaging 3-dimensional and 2-dimensional artworks, such as her engaging installations and photography, so that we may address such issues - and for good reason. After all, the media, arguably one of society’s greatest influences when it comes to shaping our behaviour, has only very recently become more open to embracing attitudes and people that were once deemed to fall outside of societies norms. You only have to be someone in your 20s for instance, to recall the blatant and off-the-cuff sexist, racist and homophobic remarks and total lack of inclusivity that was prevalent in kids’ television shows throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
Nevertheless, just because the media is changing, it doesn’t mean people’s attitudes are adjusting as quickly. The struggle (though, as someone who wrote two dissertations on conscientious objection, I don’t like to use such aggressive tones; why does everything have to be a struggle, fight or war against something? As a keener reader of history, I can’t recall anytime that killing or hurting someone else achieved anything but misery) therefore to promote a more open society continues – and is a movement that Rachel is keen to support through her artworks.
For Rachel, the urge to create is seemingly instinctual and she holds a deep fascination with how our ideas are able to manifest themselves into something physical. ‘In childhood, my main mediums were traditional drawing and soft pastel, but I moved onto 3D work as a teenager and learned to combine these mediums to construct my own visual language’ she says. In a manner similar to how the previous article was concluded, Rachel also believes that art acts as gateway into the creator’s mind, as she says: ‘Art provides access to our most personal and inner selves.
It is always interesting to visualise what lurks in the subconscious...art is a signature of existence, for it allows me to draw upon my feelings of the world and bring forth imagery which no one else can exactly replicate. It also allows for self-expression and catharsis. I am particularly inspired by Louise Bourgeois [an artist, who’s extensive career spanned from the 1930s until 2010, who was known for her sculpture and installation work] who once said, “Art is a guarantee of sanity”. By projecting our inner universe onto materials and objects, we can leave a trace of ourselves on the world; we can plant ideas, emotions and opinions... everywhere is a space in which art can grow.’ The world that Rachel grew up in however, was one that placed a great deal of emphasis on one’s identity; an attitude which helped to construct the very foundations of her works today.
‘I think that growing up Northern Ireland influenced how I relate to the world we live in... I think it was particularly difficult growing up in an environment of social conflicts as a queer person [once used as a derogatory term, ‘queer’ has since been reclaimed by the LBGTQ+ community to encompass those who don't identify with traditional notions of gender identity and sexual orientation] ... I feel that my experiences and ideas as a queer person offer perspectives which are not prioritised or focused upon in our current society, despite their deep impact on many people’ Rachel informs me. ‘To be queer is to be trapped between the imaginary, and heteronormative expectations. I think it is very important to highlight this and strive to make queer people feel understood...Growing up, I had very little reassurance when it came to my identity. I hid those parts of myself in fear of being exiled or misunderstood. From queer-coded Disney villains to my own country’s political climate, the very concept of being queer was always painted as negative. I enjoy reclaiming the idea of the “monstrous queer”, there is an irony in being perceived as dangerous. It also ties in with theories of queerness and witchcraft; metamorphosis, outsider sororities, challenging “life”as defined by patriarchal society... yet by studying and representing the complexities of gender and sexuality, we can be part of a society that is changing for the better...this is perhaps why I focus so much on identity and how important it is to understand each other... for I believe art grants us the freedom to attempt this’.
Though, whilst these days and particularly since the likes of 1960s, art has arguably been used as a tool by which to blend cultures and promote inclusivity, it was also once a means by which to highlight our differences. For millennia for example, art was used to create banners, tattoos, symbols and embellishments in order to illustrate that a person or group of people belonged to certain clan, religion or class. As society has become less aggressive however, well according to the likes of psychologist Steven Pinker at least, so has the tone of our artworks. Indeed, far from entrenching our differences, art is now providing us with the ability to, as Rachel demonstrates through the likes of her installations, better understand each other and communicate with the world around us.
From the 1960s onwards, as mentioned, art itself increasingly became to be seen by many, much as it is today, as a friendly tool that could be used to bring society together; hippies painted rainbows, ‘art therapy’ became a thing and tourists admired and photographed religious artworks even if they themselves didn’t belong to that religion. Little surprise therefore that in today’s world an interest in art is something that’s often associated with people who are seen to be ‘free spirited’ or more liberally inclined. This progressive change in attitudes towards humanities artworks, however, also gave birth to entirely new art forms – such as the engaging and experiential orientated, installation.
Spawned from the ‘environments’ that artists such as Allan Kaprow designed within gallery spaces during the late 1950s, installations became increasingly used as a means by which to unify a bunch of mediums in one single room and treat such a mix as an artwork in its own right. So, rather than have viewers engage with multiple individual artworks that hung from various areas on the wall, gallery visitors could now view a multitude of artistic mediums that had been unified under one roof. What makes installations so unique however, is their ability to create an immersive and 3-dimensional experience for the viewer, something Rachel strongly endorses, as she says: ‘I enjoy installation as an art form as it enables a more personal and intimate experience with the work in comparison to traditional art forms which are more static.
The ability to physically move around the object enables a multi-sensory experience determined by the environment... In my work ‘Dialogue’ for instance, by placing the heads on the floor I invite the audience to crouch beside them, to look at them from above, to circle them... the changing light indicates that communication is happening’. Her installations, however, also represent interconnectivity and tension between our established world and that of an idealised one. ‘‘In-Between’ is an installation piece made of welded pieces of metal and rope covered in latex and acrylic’ Rachel tells me. ‘The circular shapes are indicative of doorways and the sculpture acts as a portal between a heteronormative world and a queer utopia [an ideal that’s been defined in many ways but can loosely be denoted as a world in which all people have equal rights and where the lines between sexual orientation are blurred].
The addition of the rope suggests being tethered between these two spaces. This is the reality of queerness; we can fantasise and imagine another world, but we will always be bound to our experiences. The work aims to be encountered as a tangible physical object, manifesting the symbolic queer body into the real world. Through this, the work rejects the limitations placed on queer people and encourages viewers to disassociate from their own sense of self. In this sense,I would love to bring this work to locations other than a gallery and explore its potential for creating dialogue about the subject’.
Nevertheless, to discuss the liberal changes that have taken place within the art world within the past sixty years and utilise Rachel’s works as example of these shifts, is not to espouse that art is now universally used as a tool to encourage inclusivity and engagement. On the contrary, many people, from militant groups and football hooligans to racist bigots and religious fanatics, still look to utilise humanities artistic mediums as a means by which to promote hate and indifference – and in that regard, for positive and progressive ideas to properly flourish it’s helpful to be around like-minded people.
‘My artistic journey has been an unusual one. I began my studies on a Film course and quickly realised that the endless sketches in my notebooks became a kind of escapism. I enjoyed my time on the course, but felt an instinctual urge towards artistic practice and pursued this through applying to a Foundation Art and Design course in Belfast School of Art. I found myself in a world that I had engaged with in small ways my entire life and knew that this is where I was meant to be’ Rachel expresses. ‘From there, I completed a BA (Hons) Fine Art degree and I am now going into my final year of a Master of Fine Art degree. During this time, I have exhibited both nationally and internationally and have won awards such as the Platform Arts Graduate Award and the Alice Berger Hammerschlag Award. This year I was also asked to participate in a show with the MASS art x SoWa Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, surrounding concepts of the queer body. It was an incredible experience to work with other artists thinking about similar ideas surrounding identity and has indeed been a milestone in my artistic career’.
One useful way Rachel attempts to foster such feelings of interconnectedness is via her recent sculptures and installations by utilising a variety of mediums, as she says:‘I think that when investigating experiences of queerness, the use of unconventional materials allow for greater self-expression. Queer artists’ use of latex, for instance, is interesting due to the material’s relation with BDSM and threats of violence against the body. Though, whilst my work doesn’t specifically focus upon these aspects, I think by simply utilising the material it becomes a part of the object’s history. I made the rope in ‘IN-BETWEEN’ by hanging it from the ceiling from clothes hangers and pouring layers of latex onto it. I mixed different shades of pink, red and purple to achieve more depth, using my hands to build upon different sections for more texture. This act alone felt violent. The rope dripped onto the floor for about a day, leaving blood splattered marks below it. I did not intervene with how it dried as I wanted a less controlled outcome. My next steps with latex will be to learn the casting process and test new ways of adding colour’. Though, whilst her use of rope and metal is indeed useful when it comes to representing such interconnected intensity, there is another material that, particularly when we associate it with being used in great quantities, emits a powerful tensity in its own right.
‘When working with the Sellotape bodies, I began by wrapping a mannequin’ Rachel outlines. ‘This process felt strange, like I was suffocating the figure. I cut along the back of the mannequin to remove the layer of plastic, but this also felt wrong because this again was a human-shaped figure. I taped the body back together and it began to feel like a strange clone, too posed and too outwardly feminine. My way of combatting this was to make more Sellotape bodies from the same mannequin and cut them into separate parts – torsos, heads, legs. This allowed me to create odd re-imaginings of the body, like the decapitated talking heads in ‘Dialogue’ and the worm-like figure in ‘Splitting’... ‘Splitting’ seemed to resonate the most with my attempts to create an abstracted, queer body. The material’s transparency and fragility added to its otherworldly aura, and by fitting the two torsos together I made the figure helpless in their inability to walk, see, hold or stand. I had brought a metaphorically queer body into the real world, and it could not survive... I believe that the use of Sellotape allowed the figure to be something real but also something empty and reflective’.
If you enjoyed this article and want to see more from Rachel check out her socials and website:
A Postface, by the Editor:
I try to make Art Etcetera a different kind of magazine, not only by including an incredibly wide range of art forms, but also by writing about art itself differently, somethingI attempt to achieve by adding a variety of contexts to the artist’s works and life stories. By discussing humanities artworks in such a way, I not only hope to bridge the gap between an artist’s understanding of their works and ours; but to illuminate our perception of the world. In this regard, I try to follow the ethos of the great historian Greg Denning, who once said: ‘my understanding of history [or in this case, art] is not so much to understand the world but to change it. If my history [or, again, analyses of artworks] by story and reflection disturbs the moral lethargy of the living to change in their present the consequences of their past, then it fulfils a need. I have not silenced any voice by adding mine’.
Throughout this article however, I have been quieter than usual and that’s because as a heterosexual male I do not believe that I could ever truly have possessed the insight required to have properly conveyed Rachel’s Queer orientated themes. For this, I believed that it was her voice that was needed here more so than mine. After all, it is Rachel, who constructs her works through her own sometimes difficult subjective experiences, ones I have never been through. Indeed, much of history and what we continue to read within the media, be it a 1990s study of China’s Great Leap Forward or a 2023 article on the Black Lives Matter Movement, is often written by someone who lives comfortably behind a desk rather than someone who has been directly impacted by those events and subsequent emotions. On this point, if we ever truly want to achieve societal change through understanding, then it’s perhaps time that publications, be it academic journals or news corporations, turned down the volume of their narratives (or egos one might say) so that those at the very heart of such matters can be heard.
Comments