Rachy McEwan

Rachy McEwan is an artist based in Glasgow, Scotland.

She studied her Bachelor of Fine Art: Painting and Printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 2020.

Working with painting, textiles, sculpture and digital media (as well as a considerable dose of black humour), McEwan exposes the dissonance between the aesthetic value we attach to what we buy and the ugly damage that the materials we use to attain these values have upon the world today.

Investigating over-consumption, the work is motivated by a deep concern about the way that capitalist culture shapes the consumer’s everyday life, damaging our understanding of the effects we have on the planet.

The work presents fashion as a construction of aesthetic expression but also considers whether or not consumers really understand the environmental impact and sustainability of the products they buy. Exploiting the materiality of the products the consumer desires, McEwan reveals to the audience the implications or consequences they obtain once bought and disposed of.

Bearing in mind the human species’ ongoing complicity with the very system of capitalism that creates these damaged landscapes, McEwan depicts a world in which humans (and other organisms) co-exist with environmental disturbance.