To coincide with the artist's new exhibition upside mimi ᴉɯᴉɯ uʍop at Jupiter Artland we revisit and celebrate nearly a decade of creativity and collaboration between Edinburgh Printmakers and Rachel Maclean. Edinburgh Printmakers have supported Maclean since her graduation from Edinburgh College of Art, first exhibiting her work in a new graduate exhibition in 2012.

 

Maclean's earlier studio work was made in the run up to the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014, and the contradictions and complexities of Scottish identity explored in her prints are just as relevant today as conversations around independence continue.

 

Meanwhile the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (2012) triptych deals with the sexualisation of the female body, juxtaposing glamour with the grotesque. Similar themes are explored in Maclean's current work upside mimi ᴉɯᴉɯ uʍop, which examines the fetishisation of young girls.

 

Maclean's new commission upside mimi ᴉɯᴉɯ uʍop is now on permanent display at Jupiter Artland alongside a solo exhibition featuring four key works: Spite Your Face (2017), Eyes To Me (2015), Germs (2013) and The Lion and the Unicorn (2012). The exhibition runs from 8 May until 18 July and tickets are available via the Jupiter Artland website.

  • Rachel maclean, The Lion, 2018 £475
    Rachel maclean, The Lion, 2018
    £475

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     You can support artists with Own Art, spreading your payments across a longer period. So Rachel Maclean's  The Lion could be yours for just ten monthly payments of £47.50 over 10 months interest free. See the Own Art page for more info.
  • Maclean’s visual narratives are used to recreate and deconstruct such legendary spaces and unmapped territories, populating them with a host...
    Rachel Maclean, The Queen, 2013

    £900.00

    Maclean’s visual narratives are used to recreate and deconstruct such legendary spaces and unmapped territories, populating them with a host of recognisable stereotypes: Clyde the cheeky, thistle-shaped Commonwealth Games mascot, tribal clashes between Celtic and Rangers football fans, frustrated golfers, beheaded queens and a tam o’shanter fashioned Loch Ness Monster. Maclean’s characters exist within the alternative realities of an unsettling Scottish fantastic, teasing its platitudes and revelling in its kitschy persona. I HEART Scotland prizes cheap souvenirs as it interrogates those shallow understandings and faked experiences.[i] Quaintness decays into horror. (Dr. Catriona McAra)

    [i] See Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, vol. 1, John O’Brian ed., University of Chicago Press, 1986), 5-22.

  • I HEART SCOTLAND

    2ND AUGUST - 7TH SEPTEMBER 2013, EDINBURGH PRINTMAKERS GALLERY (UNION ST)

    At once grotesquely positive and violently kitsch, this exhibition employed a dark humour to present a playful and multi-layered reading of contemporary Scottish identity.

    Presenting a body of film and print work, the exhibition examined the nation’s romantic histories through the lens of contemporary political debate, creating a complex and surreal vision of modern Scotland. At the time responding to the upcoming Referendum on Scottish Independence in 2014, the show explored a sense of both power and absurdity within representations of Scottish and British national pride.

     

    Installed with a Baroque distain for emptiness, the work transformed the space into an intimate National Gallery, come shop bought Victorian castle. Maclean is the only actor or model in the work, inventing characters that toy with age and gender and refer to an array of historical figures, contemporary politicians and national stereotypes.

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    The ‘Your Future’ series – commissioned and published by Edinburgh Printmakers –

    present semi-historical, semi-fantastical tableaus. At once alluring and monstrous, these images explore a hybrid of styles, referencing the rugged romance of Scottish Landscape painting, the all-smiling, futurist visions of SNP propaganda and the hyper-saturated pop colours of ‘Oor Wullie’.

    Alongside these prints, Maclean exhibited a short film titled “The Lion and The Unicorn”. Inspired by the heraldic symbols found on the Royal Coat of Arms of The United Kingdom (the lion representing England and the unicorn representing Scotland) the video uses these icons of both alliance and opposition to explore a range of contradictory standpoints on nationalism. The video features three recurrent characters: the lion, the unicorn and the queen. Through a use of costume and appropriated audio, these figures emerge from disparate genres, including shadowy historical reconstruction, playful nursery rhyme and pragmatic TV interview. Inhabiting the rich historical setting of Traquair House in the Scottish Borders, they are seen drinking North-sea oil from Jacobite crystal, dividing up the pieces of a Union Jack cake and inciting conflict over the mispronunciation of Robert Burns.

     

    At once grotesquely positive and violently kitsch, this exhibition employed a dark humour to present a playful and multi-layered reading of contemporary Scottish identity.

  • Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

    "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ (2012) is a digital print triptych exploring visions of glamour and the grotesque that draws on a diversity of imagery,

     merging the disease-ridden poor and the gluttonous aristocracy of 18th-century caricature with the shamelessly plastic body of Katie Price. Emaciated skeletal frames and outlandishly over-weight bodies are seen piled one on top of the other. They eat, crap, grope and enjoy cocktails through penis straws, serving up their balloon breasts, moulded plastic bums and balding platinum curls for the hungry, desirous viewer in an aggressive display of sexual availability." (Rachel Maclean)

  • The Artist

    The Artist

    Rachel Maclean is a multi-media artist living and working in Glasgow. Edinburgh Printmakers have supported Maclean since her graduation from Edinburgh College of Art, first exhibiting her work in a new graduate exhibition in 2012.

     

    Maclean works with film and photography, using green screen to create outlandish characters and fantasy worlds. Her saccharine and child-like aesthetics tell unsettling, challenging narratives about socio-political identities. Maclean plays most of the characters in her films herself, using colourful costumes and make-up. The artist uses computer technology to generate her locations and borrows audio from television and cinema. Mixing high art and popular culture, advanced technology with traditional theatrical values, humour with serious politics, Maclean has fashioned a unique visual universe in her art. These worlds are as digitally sophisticated as they are handcrafted and laborious.

     

     Click here to view full biography/cv