Rachel Rothwell

In 2021, I was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award, with which I interviewed eight artists, educators and curators working in the field of socially engaged art and created the e-publication Talking Out Loud.

In this publication, we discuss our experiences of working in the field, their questions on this practice and their hopes for the future as socially engaged art continues to grow and expand in Ireland. Brought together under a series of topics, these conversations are an informal stroll through the field, providing points for reflection and a great starting point for those curious to know more.

Talking Out Loud includes conversations with William Bock, Jessica Bonenfant, Helen Carey, Mary Conroy, Clodagh Emoe, Hollie Kearns, Gareth Kennedy, and Fiona Whelan.

Talking Out Loud can be read in full here.

In spring 2022, I was a Resident Artist at St George’s NHS Hospital in Tooting. I worked with patients, staff and visitors all over the hospital.

A medical space is necessarily aseptic and often anonymous, so it was important to me to bring a little bit of the outside world in to the wards. I devised a series of workshops run with the hospital community to explore the nature found around the hospital grounds, in which they could take a short break from the stress of their situation and experiment with new materials and skills.

This work involved liaising closely with the Arts at St George’s team as well as the hospital staff. Activities had to be engaging, yet adaptable to each patient’s abilities and interests. I travelled around the hospital buildings, working with different people so my activities had to be easy to transport, as well as fit the hospital’s rigorous sanitary requirements.

This project was a thoroughly rewarding experience and it was incredible to see the positive reaction from everyone who encountered the activiites. The necessity of these interventions in care settings is easily overlooked, but they have a huge role to play in making hospitals more ‘human’ spaces.

You can read more about my experience in this interview:

https://www.stgeorgeshospitalcharity.org.uk/news/patients-and-families-lifted-out-of-the-hospital-experience

All photos are reproduced with permission and are copyright of Benedict Johnson Photography, St George’s NHS Hospital Tooting, Spring 2022.

In the 2021-2022 edition of the Living Arts Project, I was Lead Artist, with Bríd Colloton as Assistant Artist. We worked with fifth class students at Scoil Mhuire Coolcotts in Wexford town over the course of 8 weeks to explore how food and art relate; examining food as a subject in art, as a material and as a creative political or social tool.

We discussed different artworks and theories, while making using a variety of natural materials, including making vegetable ink, using charcoal and mono-printing with cabbage leaves and found materials.

We aimed to expose the children to a variety of materials, processes and artists; focusing on the creative experience rather than the output and steering them away from the idea of being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at art.

At the end of these 8 weeks, we organised an exhibition at the school. We involved the students in the direction of the project from beginning to end, encouraging collaborative artwork, critical thinking and ensuring their voices were heard in the exhibition design process.

Photos : Frank Abruzzese, Workshops and Exhibition at Scoil Mhuire Coolcotts

I worked as an Assistant Artist with Kate Murphy at St. Teresa’s NS in Ballyellis, Gorey on the Living Arts Project 2020-2021. This project is a joint endeavour between Wexford County council and Wexford Arts Centre.

The aim of The Living Arts Project is to introduce primary school students to contemporary art and provide them with an appreciation and understanding of this genre. We completed an 8 week residency at the school, working with 3rd and 6th class to explore drawing and create contemporary art pieces. At the end of the residency, the students’ work was displayed in an online exhibition, along with the other schools who took part in the project.

With 3rd class, we decided to focus on the world around us and we used shadow as our drawing medium. Cardboard cut-outs of their favourite elements of our world came together towards a series of Shadowland installations... The Land, the Oceans and Space. The pieces themselves were coloured with various media.. oil pastel, charcoal, marker, collage... and coloured sellophane brought colour to our giant, billowing shadow projections.

6th class are an active group, and through a brain-storming session, we discovered that combining movement, games or sports with our drawing experiments could inspire our creativity. We took huge paper outside and the children went BIG with their marks, using large actions such as running and jumping with large tools such as mops and balls of straw to experiment with various media, such as charcoal, paint, crayon and chalk. Through this play, we arrived at a set of large and small scale, individual and collaborative abstract pieces which explore mark-making, colour and composition.

You can view the online exhibition in full here:

https://livingartsproject.ie/2021-exhibition/

This community project ran from 2020-2022 with the aim of capturing a snapshot of the memories associated with Wexford town and its surrounds.

I began Wexford Stories in 2020 when I received an Artist Bursary from Creative Ireland and Wexford County Council. I wanted to create a public resource that would highlight parts of Wexford that aren’t necessarily on the tourist trail, as well as the people who have made their mark on the town.

Stories can be submitted via the website and instagram page, where they are published online with a custom illustration and shared with the public. Written, visual and audio submissions are welcome from anyone with a memory to share.

When restrictions allowed, I collaborated with two groups (a 3rd year class at Selskar College, Wexford and a community group in Ballythomas, Co. Wexford) to explore the notions of memory and place in more detail, through a series of creative workshops. We used a variety of media and discussed our memories as we created.

These were then transformed into physical ‘memory maps’ and distributed at various public locations and events as an alternative to the traditional ‘tourist map’, allowing the public to examine their surroundings in a new way.

As part of the group exhibition Wir baut mer es oerliker Traumhus - How to build an Oerlikon Dream House in June 2023, I proposed a collaborative recipe book.

The exhibition took place in a house due to be demolished, and posed pertinent questions on society, housing, development and what it means to be a community today.

Over the course of the exhibition, I collected recipes from the public, via a ‘recipe box’ installed in the kitchen. Afterwards, I collated these recipes into a booklet and sent a digital copy to each participant as a gesture of thanks for their generosity in sharing.

Food is fuel, it is essential to our survival. It provides nourishment, comfort, pleasure. Food is how we show care, how we carry on traditions, how we discover a new taste.

It’s also how we learn, how we share and how we put our own twist on a family recipe. Food is a window into how we eat, how we live, and how we connect with others.

This project was a collaboration between the Centre du Jour Pour Migrants de la Croix Rouge in Geneva and the art collective RSVP (Rachel Rothwell, Stoja Vukovič and Vesna Bilanovič). Our remit was to work with the migrants making use of the day centre to create an art project as a part of our MA programme.

Our objectives were to design a creative solution acceptable to all, and avoid fetishising the precarious status of our collaborators. We held a series of storytelling workshops, using everyday objects as vectors to start our conversations. Through animated conversations and many laughs, we shared cultural experiences, personal stories and childhood memories.

We kept a written transcript of these discussions, and used this to make a ‘script’. We changed the names of everyone and used an actor to record the script in order to respect the privacy of participants.

This piece was exhibited as part of the 2019 ‘Entrelacs’ show, and the audio can be found below:

Audio

This exhibition was conceived and curated by the 2019 MA TRANS Class. Our remit was to create an exhibition that explored the notion of ‘socially engaged’ art. We built the elements of the exhibition around these ideas and chose to take advantage of the space around us to put our ideas about art into practice and provide a week-long series of events, including debates, artist talks, children’s art events, concerts and a book launch.

Socially engaged art encompasses an extremely wide range of artistic practice, and this was reflected in the varied artistic practices of us, the curators. We decided to manifest this variety in the form of a giant, handheld loom, with several different coloured tissues. Over the course of the exhibition, the loom was used to weave a rug, illustrating the collaborative nature and common points running through our various disciplines.

A mobile bar and storage space was conceived to help adapt the space to each event. Lino ‘islands in several shades were printed with different questions about art, social engagement, collaborative practice and feminism. These were then used to document the discussions held during the events and provide a written ‘trace’ of our exhibition.