RACHY MCEWAN
Rachy McEwan is an interdisciplinary artist, design researcher, and technologist based in London. Her practice combines art, interactive systems, and emerging technologies to investigate urban ecologies, digital infrastructures, and more-than-human interaction. Working across painting, programming, 3D imaging, speculative design, and installation, she develops participatory experiences that examine how technological systems shape perception, behaviour, and environmental relationships.
Rachy graduated with a First Class BA in Painting and Printmaking from The Glasgow School of Art, where she received the RSA New Contemporaries Award, and later completed an MA in Material Futures at Central Saint Martins with Distinction, where she was shortlisted for the Maison/0 LVMH Maison Award. Her work has been exhibited internationally across London, Paris, Milan, Amsterdam, Estonia, and Glasgow, including presentations at Saatchi Galleryand BASE Milano.
Alongside her artistic practice, Rachy works as a design researcher with the Design Museum, developing projects exploring environmental sensing, participatory technologies, and ecological futures. She frequently collaborates across disciplines including engineering, arboriculture, science, and creative technology, combining technical experimentation with critical and conceptual inquiry.
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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.