About Rachel Rothwell

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Born in Wexford, Rachel Rothwell studied ceramics at the Limerick School of Art and Design, graduating in 2012. In 2013 she spent 12 months in South Korea, where she was an active member of both the Daejeon Arts Collective and the Professional Artist Network Korea (PANK), exhibiting regularly around the country. From 2015-2017 she lived and worked in Montreux, Switzerland, where she was secretary and resident artist at the arts association Loft A46 and held solo shows in Dublin and Switzerland before completing her MFA degree in Socially Engaged Art at the Haute École d’Art et de Design (HEAD) in Geneva in 2019. She has exhibited in several locations across Ireland, Switzerland, Finland and Germany as well as South Korea.

 

In 2020, she returned to Ireland, where she was an assistant artist in the Living Arts Project 2020-2021. She also received an artist bursary from Creative Ireland and Wexford County Council, with which she set up the community social history project Wexford Stories. She was a lead artist in the Living Arts Project from 2021-2022, completing an 8 week residency at Scoil Mhuire in Co. Wexford. In 2021 she was the recipient of an Arts Council Agility Award; with which she conducted series of interviews with other socially-engaged artists, curators and educators, culminating in the e-publication Talking Out Loud.

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She is currently a resident artist at St. George’s University Hospital in London.

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Work in Progress

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Rachels early Test Space residency research is interested in gathering stories, inspired by mapping and the community.

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She says:

'Maps are a great entry point into a city. They not only give direction, but provide a bird's eye view of a space, difficult to piece together from the ground. The names of streets, lanes, alleys and bridges provide glimpses into the past and hints at past lives lived there.

Do you have any stories about the street names in Limerick?'

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Images:

Map 1: A 1587 map of Limerick, taken from Historical Maps of Ireland by Michael Swift, Chartwell Books Inc, 1999. Map 2: Map of old city with overlay of modern streets and reclaimed land, image taken from Maps and Texts: Exploring the Irish Historic Towns Atlas edited by Sarah Gearty and H.B. Clarke

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Link to Bruno Latour's Ville Invisible website (http://www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/EN/index.html) for further reading, along with images below provided by the artist. 

 

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'I've also been thinking about observation and the macro/micro ways of viewing a city. There is something quite interesting about really focusing in on where you are and what you can sense around you, then considering where it sits in the bigger picture.'

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Memories are a snapshot in time, do you have any memories of growing up in Limerick to share? (You can submit your story across)

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Conacre: the letting of small strips of land for the purposes of tillage

The story of a place is never from just one angle. Limerick has a remarkable history of social engagement and just one example of this is the history of its allotments. Originally conceived as a way to support the unemployed, various spots around the city were allocated to the public over the years.

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(Images above provided by the artist)

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Rachel says:

'The language used by officials in organising these plots is at odds with the visceral, tactile nature of working a plot of land and growing one’s own food. Small disputes over tools and fencing are voiced and bargains struck with landowners through the medium of paper.. 

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.. During the second world war, allotments were also opened to the employed as the local government attempted to tackle the ‘serious food position’, as it is referenced in these letters, from 1941 onwards, writing to an array of locals who they understood had land available and would perhaps be interested in renting out.

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Placenames pepper the archives: Mungret St, Spittal, Thomondgate and Pike Field to name a few. They are spread around the city and its environs, showing both the appetite for and the flexibility needed in order to bring such projects to fruition, something equally necessary in their modern-day counterparts. It’s an interesting exercise to compare a social endeavour from the 1930’s with today’s efforts to find green space in our urban environments and ensure equality of access to nature. 

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(Images above provided by the artist)

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.. Italo Calvino rightly pointed out that “every life is an encyclopaedia, a library, an inventory of objects” and in combining real lives and memories with these official documents, we can achieve an understanding of place that is richer, more diverse, that sparks dialogue and can fill us with ideas for the future.'

 

Thanks to the Limerick City and County Council Archives Service for letting me share a few letters from their digital archive which you can find online here, as well as to historian Sharon Stone for providing her knowledge of where some allotment areas were in the city. 

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Previous Projects

1. Dessiner/Activer

This artwork is a practical object, used to support a discussion on community and shared spaces, yet remains a piece of art in its own right. The notebooks are tools for a conversation. They are small, light, easy to travel with when stuffed into a pocket, yet their fold-out format means they grow in size once they are activated. They become a page of thoughts, with space for many people to read and discuss them together, making notes and additions in the blank spaces. I chose to make these notebooks in two languages (French and English) and two formats (fold-out book and poster) to maximise their accessibility and to reflect the bilingual nature of my experience in this project. The goal is not to find a single answer for what community is, but to take a moment to talk about our lives together, our shared spaces and how our everyday actions can have an impact on others.

Link here. 

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2. Wexford Stories

The aim of this project was to engage the community of Wexford Town in a discussion on ‘sense of place’ and ‘identity’, exploring the local landscape through memory. I created a website and online platform where people could submit and share their memories, creative writing and poetry about Wexford (www.wexfordstories.com), which I would then add to a digital map. I received submissions not only from the local community, but from many people who had a connection with Wexford county. During the pandemic, this became a welcoming space where many could share their memories of home, local history and personal stories linked to place at a time when physical connection was not possible.

Link here. 

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