It's What's Inside That Counts
Parodies social media, advertising, children’s television programmes and fairy tales, subjects that appear frequently in Maclean’s work. The film borrows techniques global corporations use to sell well-being, youth and happiness by bombarding us with imagery and preying on our anxieties.
Rachel Maclean
Director
Also Directed by Rachel Maclean
'The Weepers' is a 30-minute short film that playfully explores Scotland's relationship with the Gothic horror genre. Drawing on a variety of cultural reference points, including Scottish myth, haunted house movies and Doctor Johnson’s trip to the Hebrides, the film is a surreal exploration of Highland culture post-Clearances, where the number of sheep has gradually exceeded that of the human population.
Sophie goes on a killing spree in a candy-coloured world.
In Germs, female stereotypes, pseudoscience and promised happiness clash with violent consequences.
Siri wakes to find herself trapped inside a brutalist candy-coloured dreamhouse. Despite the cutesy decor, the place is far from benign, and she and her inmates are encouraged to compete for survival while being watched over by surveillance cameras, 24/7. Presiding over the group is an authoritarian diva who speaks entirely with the voice of Kenneth Clark from the 1960s BBC series Civilisation. As she forces the women to go head-to-head in a series of demeaning tasks, Siri, with the help of fellow inmate Alexa, starts subverting the rules and soon reveals the sinister truth that underpins their world.
A supersaturated satire with a look into the land of data-addicted monk-like figures and dance-crazed rabbits.
Rachel Maclean’s bright, emoji-feminist fairy tale-style touches a new darkness in her first completely animated short.
A multi-character, 8-channel film sits in the centre of the exhibition. Each character, from a porcine union-jack doting politician to a phone-addicted white cat, stand in as an archetype in the UK’s political landscape as it considers its exit from the European Union. Set apart on independent monitors, these anthropomorphized incarnations menace one another through tacit acts of ridicule in a perpetually cycling theatre, falling between farcical and cruel. Maclean points us to the mechanisms of belonging and nativeness at play in the performance of national identity.
Inspired by the Technicolor utopias of children's television, Over The Rainbow invites the viewer into a shape-shifting world inhabited by cuddly monsters, faceless clones and gruesome pop divas. Shot entirely using green-screen the film presents a synthetic environment, part toy model, part computer generated landscape, which explores a dark, comedic parody of the Faustian tale, video game and horror movie genres.
Simultaneously sumptuous and gorgeous, garish and grim, this is a re-working of Pinocchio for the neo-liberal era. Rachel Maclean’s dark fairytale, which represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale 2017, depicts a brash and baroque binary world of poverty and riches where the prospect of easy wealth tempts even good boys like Pic into bad ways. But if everyone believes the lie, what’s the problem?
Feed Me is a larger than life fairy tale, part TV talent show, part thriller, video game in which Maclean plays all the parts
