Rachel Parish
Artist Bio
Rachel is a visual artist and performance maker whose work has been seen internationally at venues including Tate Britain, de Young Museum, Lyric Hammersmith, Battersea Arts Centre, Woodruff Art Center and Standpoint Gallery, as well as in public spaces such as train stations, community centers, homes for the elderly, in streets, schools and online. While at CCA she has won the Barclay Simpson Award, the Innovator Impact Award, as well as Merit and Diversity Scholarships. Currently she is developing Emergence, a series of public monuments to waterways that flow underneath Atlanta (commissioned by Flux Projects), and has been named Inaugural Artist in Residence at Vlerick Business School in Belgium where she will work with the faculty, creating artistic interventions that develop fluency with multi-sensory listening practices.
Artist Statement
I am a contemporary artist working with diverse ecologies of collaborators, including humans, nonhumans, and their histories. Whether making new performance in London, developing art-based compassion trainings with the NYPD’s Hostage Negotiation Team, designing creative placemaking programs in Atlanta, or documenting the story of a moment as told by the sun in Oakland, my work draws from conceptual and social practice and is characterized by bringing together complex communities and nurturing them through co-creative processes.
My identities as an artist, a mother and a mixed-race (African American mother, white father) woman from the southern USA, are woven lace. Equally formative, my family home was an informal safehouse, welcoming over a hundred people to live with us as I grew up. New people arrived with little notice and with a backdrop of varied contexts of crisis (from individuals experiencing homelessness or diagnosed with AIDS in the late 1980s, to refugees awaiting asylum) and would stay for anywhere from a day to years. It was a life of radical hospitality, rooted in traditions of rural creole culture and a commitment to social justice. These orientations are the bedrock for my craft as an artist in the world.
While building on my experience with complex groups of people, my current work has broadened to include working with non-human and non corporeal agents such as the sun, ancestors, archival documents, soil and seeds. Similarly expansive are the materials: found wood, scraped knees, words, craft paper, the force of the wind, performance, stretched canvas, hand-woven fabric, oral histories, No. 2 pencils–multiplicities of these mark-makers contribute to the process and documentation of the creative gestures I initiate and nurture. These agents are collaborators in the co-creative process. My creative task is to tune my listening in to attend to their particular modality of communication and, moving with care and craft, to sculpt spaces of dialogic processes alongside them.