Rachel Maclean
Rachel Maclean is a Scottish interdisciplinary artist based in Glasgow, who works primarily with digital videos, film, animation, and photography. While studying for her BA in Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art (2005-2009), Maclean started using green-screen technology to create fantastical, candy coloured worlds that now characterise her practice. Maclean uses costume, elaborate make-up, and found footage to create the characters and has often played all of the characters in her films. By playing a multitude of roles, Maclean explores the construction of identity, on an individual and collective level, in relation to gender, nationalism and class. Maclean works with tropes from TV, cinema and popular culture, warping familiar images into more sinister messages in order to provoke her viewers to question what they are really seeing. She is particularly interested in exploring ‘cuteness’ and why this aesthetic is so alluring. Maclean won the Margaret Tait Award in 2013 and represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2017.
