Rachel McClure
Scotland
Born in Watford, Rachel McClure lives and works in Elgin. She studied at Moray School of Art, University of the Highlands and Islands and graduated with First Class BA Hons Fine Art Textiles during the pandemic in 2020. She was awarded the Grampian Hospital Art Trust (GHAT) exhibition award and selected for RSA New Contemporaries 2022. She also won the Highland Arts Society Prize (2018) in a selected show.
Her practice encompasses sound, photography, print and casting. Rachel uses the multisensory experience of Urban Walking to capture unseen and un-noticed instances to explore and map her environment.
“My practice includes sound recordings, photographs, printmaking, cement and plaster casts from the street and the creation of plaster sound-casts (casting the ephemeral).
I explore Urban Walking as an artistic practice in the centre of Elgin, a small town in the North of Scotland. Taking repeated walks around the town, using familiar and unfamiliar routes, listening and experiencing, noticing differences, recording sounds, and taking instant photographs in the form of polaroids, (in the moment, no editing possible). The lifting of a place, a scene, a road sign in the same way the casts are lifted from the street. Straight from the urban environment to gallery.
This work expanded during 2020 to encompass the Lockdown experience of dislocation to the countryside and walking there during the global Covid pandemic.
As walkers we contribute to the fabric of everyday life in an individual manner, transforming place into space, creating a meshwork of individual maps, constantly changing, creating our own rhythms which contribute to the rhythm and production of space in the city. Walking is central to this as it allows direct contact with our surroundings and through the multisensory embodied experience to create, explore and map our environment.
Using sound recordings, concrete and plaster I capture instances of the walk, the unseen and un-noticed and consider the materiality of the urban environment. The translation of objects and sounds from their original environment into the gallery brings our attention to aspects of the walk, encouraging immersion and reconnection the next time one walks down the street."