Rachel Maclean’s work comments on the consumerist values and habits of contemporary society. Born in Edinburgh 1987, the Glasgow based artist-filmmaker features centre stage in her works, creating different guises and fantastical settings with green screen technology.
Maclean’s films are a parody of fairy tales, children's programmes, YouTube videos and beauty advertisements taking the viewer into a candy-coated and hyper-saturated world with a caustic bite.
Feed Me, 2015, a film produced by the artist and Film and Video Umbrella, is a hypermodern parable of the seven deadly sins highlighting the pleasure and perils of indulgence. The film emphasises the commercialistion and sexulisation of infancy in modern culture and a corresponding infantilisation often displayed in adult behaviour.
Maclean often uses audio recordings which the characters lip synch creating collages of different materials from old Hollywood films. Maclean highlights the excesses of consumerism in the dystopian worlds she creates, with characters acting out modern day fairy tales, their identities inevitably collapse over the course of the narrative. She uses lurid, bright colours to discomfort and unsettle the viewer, to add humour and lighten the mood, but there is always a dark reality as an undercurrent to the work.
Feed Me can be seen at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery as part of our National Partners Programme exhibition I Want! I Want!: Art & Technology, until 1 October 2017.
The National Partners Programme brings works from the Collection to four major galleries across the UK, find out more.