Finding Foundlings
at the Foundling Museum

Artist Residency at the Foundling Museum supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Heritage Consortium and Sheffield Hallam University. This was undertaken as part of her PhD practice-based research.

Rachel exhibited at the museum in October 2016, artworks included: Kept Within the Bounds, the Anthem, an Interruption, and the March.

The exhibition included an evening of talks from Caro Howell, Alison Duke, Dr. Helen Wickstead, and Dr. Becky Shaw.

Kept Within The Bounds
The Painting Gallery, the Foundling Museum

During workshop sessions with contemporary children in the museum, Rachel employed methods from performance practice to allow the children to construct a foundling ‘character’. After role-play, the children painted their foundling. Each portrait is a painting of two people, the child artist and the imagined foundling child.

The children’s paintings were integrated into the installation Kept Within the Bounds, which included sound and mirrored the floorplan of the Foundling Hospital. Rachel purposefully positioned the work in the Painting Gallery, below the portraits of the hospital donors, to draw attention to the men who have been remembered and the children who had been forgotten.

The Anthem
Handel’s Room, the Foundling Museum

Children from the Putney Treblemakers learn Handel’s “Foundling Hospital Anthem”, exhibited as part of the artist residency closing event at the Foundling Museum.

An Interruption
The Foyer, the Foundling Museum

Children’s voices – reading their foundling character’s names – echo in time with the Foundling Museum clocks, chiming on each quarter-hour. The work played on the idea that children should be seen and not heard. 

Camberwell ILEA Collection,
Remote Sensing

Rachel responded to the ILEA Collection during the pandemic in 2021, working as part of the ‘In-Heritage Group’, a community of practice at University of the Arts London. The work was exhibited in the Camberwell College Library and presented at Remote Sensing.

Rachel approached the collection through the lends of the illustrator. Illustration stems from the Latin word illustrare, which means to ‘illuminate’ – it is ‘a shining’, ‘a manifestation’. With this in mind, she made photographic prints of the objects in the ILEA collection using camera-less photography methods and the light of a digital screen and an enlarger; a process that could be described as a ‘light rubbing’. It was an attempt to come closer to the object by making a copy of it that that you can hold. 

The Outsider
the Brontë Parsonage
Museum

A sound installation exhibited at the Brontë Parsonage Museum (October 2018 – January 2019), supported by Grant in Aid through Arts Council England.

Rachel Emily Taylor worked with children from schools in Keighley and Haworth to explore ideas of a ‘contemporary Heathcliff’. The children took part in creative workshops which allowed them to explore the landscape surrounding the Brontë Parsonage Museum. The children’s behaviour on Penistone Hill differed from that in the classroom and was reminiscent of Heathcliff’s relationship with the moors.

Rachel recorded the children reading poems that they had written about ‘being’ in the landscape. These recordings were then shaped into ‘clock chimes’ that ‘ring’ every fifteen minutes. The sound was embedded in a walnut case, reminiscent of a mantelpiece clock. 

The chimes ring over a four-hour period, echoing the length of time it took Lockwood to walk from Wuthering Heights to Thrushcross Grange; connecting the routine of the contemporary classroom, Heathcliff’s harsh treatment, and the children’s experience on the moors.

She developed a liking for rooks
Bowes Museum

Commissioned by the Bowes Centre for a group exhibition at Bowes Museum (November 2018 – January 2019).

The Bowes Museum was conceived by John and Joséphine Bowes. Joséphine laid the first stone in 1869, but both would not live to see the completion of their building. 

As part of the residency, Rachel researched and developed a commission in response to Joséphine’s health, who during the museum build, grew sicker and continued taking potassium sulphide baths laced with sulphuric acid that turned her nails black; ‘she grew ever more neurotic, she was terrified of mice but developed a liking for rooks’.

The final installation was a sound piece and drawings on the windows, that cast shadows throughout the Lady Ludlow Gallery. 

Charmed and Hypnotised
the Horniman Museum

Supported by Arts Council England.

Rachel worked in collaboration with hypnotherapist Lorna Cordwell and Professor Giuliana Mazzoni to explore how participants responded to handling the charms and amulets in the museum collection while under hypnosis.

The project was exhibited at the Horniman Museum in 2016 as part of Magic Late and at V22 in 2017.

The girl who lived in Bishops’ House
Bishops’ House Museum

Exhibited as part of ‘Curious House’, Art Sheffield 2016, and supported by Arts Council England, Bishops’ House, A.G.P. Works and Loop Print.

Curious House showcased a series of site-specific artworks responding to Bishops’ House, Sheffield. Built around 1500 the house is the best surviving example of a timber framed building in this area. Artists Lyndall Phelps, Rachel Emily Taylor, Louise Finney, and Caroline Claisse were invited to respond to the historic space. Through their individual art practices, their work reveals histories that are currently untold and ‘invisible’.

For Rachel Emily Taylor, Curious House began with a conversation with Trudy, who spent her childhood in Bishops’ House until her family moved out in 1973. In her piece The Girl Who Lived in Bishops’ House, Rachel combined fragments, layered voice recordings, augmented by slide projections – or ‘screen’ memories – of family photographs and documentation from Museums Sheffield’s archive.

Cecil’s Captions
the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic

Rachel undertook a 16-day artist residency at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in August 2015, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Sheffield Hallam University.

During that time, Rachel worked in the archive, researching the original, water-damaged captions written by the founder Cecil Williamson. She re-typed the captions – copying the grammar, spelling and layout of the originals – and left them in the landscape, typed on rice paper, taking the museum into the environment. There were 30 captions in total, placed in Boscastle, Tintagel, St Nectan’s Glen, Bodmin and Roughtor.