![]() ![]() She started her charity, Skilled and Ready, because she has always been passionate about helping young people get the best start in life. She helped set up the LoveBrum charity supporting grassroots volunteer-led charities that don't receive government funding. She recently completed a term as an elected Parent Governor at a Birmingham school, with responsibility for the curriculum area. Over the years she has been a voluntary worker and fundraiser for the National Childbirth Trust, a Sunday School Teacher, as well as spending 15 years as a Beaver, Cub, Scout Leader and Assistant District Commissioner for Cubs. Rachel has always worked in her local community since at age 16 she began helping with summer camps for children from inner city Birmingham held at Alvechurch. The business was selected to participate in the Entrepreneurial Spark programme in Birmingham, and received seed funding from Sprint Pirates, a leading technology accelerator in London. She's a technology entrepreneur who also recently co-founded an HR software business, providing a platform for SMEs to use the latest technology tools to run their businesses more efficiently. Over the years she faced the challenges and setbacks that many small business owners experience, but the business eventually flourished and now employs people from all over the Midlands area including Redditch people, as well as having an international presence. Rachel has a background in business, after she married her husband David, they set up a Birmingham based publishing company, specialising in IT and software content. She currently lives in Dorridge, a 10 minute drive from Redditch, and she knows Redditch well from visiting over the years for work, and to bring her cub pack kayaking on the Arrow Valley Lake. ![]() She will be moving as soon as possible to make her family home in Redditch. She's a Midlands girl born and bred, and has spent most of her life in the Solihull and Birmingham area. There is a hand on top of the digitally printed brushstrokes, embellishing the mechanical, quietly insisting upon the individuality of highlights and the tenacity of imperfection, a new narcissism of small differences that represents freedom from the forces - social, pharmaceutical, technological - compelling women to be more critical of themselves.Midlands born and bred, Rachel went to the local comprehensive school and is a working Mum with four grown up children and a rescue dog, Phoebe. The paintings aren’t, however, infinitely repeatable. Paintings and sculptures of the two Mimis seem flawless and endlessly repeatable, a levelling into homogeneity via digital painting and 3D printing that highlights the creepy effacement of individuality brought about by screens, our modern mirrors. Woven tapestries mix traditional blending of colours in an almost painterly fashion with disconcerting synthetic fibres, short-circuiting a traditional process by both modernising it and undermining it. Gravity pulls both ways, with each work partnered to an inverted double, perpetually upending to reveal new forms and faces- a neat shorthand for the mysterious lack of an anchoring horizon in digitally mediated life. Maclean mirrors and inverts throughout the exhibition, employing technology and fabrication to hit repeated notes of uneasy, uncanny perfection in a seamless, sometimes seemingly virtual space in which the viewer is implicated. It isolates her as it defines her, bullies her and tricks her, and most of all divides her in two. But the mirror, like every fairy-tale antagonist, does more harm than good. “Maybe you can save Mi,” she says to the hand-mirror lying on the grass. ![]() It has a test, challenging the protagonist as it escalates, and it has a dramatic conclusion. Upside mimi ᴉɯᴉɯ uʍop is a fairy tale: it has an apple-cheeked child, and a wizened crone. That’s not Mi! is an unprecedented intervention of the 40-46 Riding House Street galleries and the climax of the Mimi project upside mimi ᴉɯᴉɯ uʍop - the artists first fully animated film, debuted at Jupiter Artland in May 2021 before being recently screened at the London Film Festival in October 2021. Over the past decade, Maclean’s celebrated works of incisive commentary on modern life cloaked in costume and graphic skins have travelled the world, from the National Gallery and Tate in London to the Venice Biennale, where she was the 2017 representative for Scotland. ![]()
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