User:Colinetto/rachelgadsden

Rachel Gadsden
Rachel Gadsden is a multi-award winning visual and performance artist who is exhibited internationally and who works across the mainstream and disability art sectors. She describes herself as ‘presenting cross-cultural visual dialogues that consider the most profound notions of what it is to be human.’

Early life
Gadsden received a BA (Hons) Fine Art Painting from Wimbledon School of Art in 1998, an Anatomy for Artists Diploma from UCH Medical School, London in 2000 and MA Fine Art, City and Guilds of London Art School in 2001. Her artistic career began with the support of a Prince's Youth Business Trust Award (1988). Gadsden was commended in the 2011 International Freedom to Create competition.

Gadsden is an exciting and unique visual and performance artist with over 20 years experience of creating dynamic work as both solo artist, and collaborator as well as leading a range of national and international participative programmes.

Working style
At the core of her practice are concerns as to how humankind comes to terms with mortality: by unearthing the unseen, making the invisible visible. Part of that process is about being open about impairment, and working to empower others to find a voice with which to challenge stigma. Ultimately Gadsden’s work is underpinned by themes of fragility and resilience, a shared and positive sense of survival in the face of chronic health conditions, and the politics and mythologies surrounding disability.

Awards
In 2013 the Qatari Government's UK Year of Culture featured "This Breathing World", a major solo exhibition of 54 artworks & films as part of the first ever Art & Disability Festival in the Middle East at Katara Cultural Village, Doha.

In 2012 Gadsden won a major award from the Arts Council’s Unlimited programme, designed to support disabled artists across the UK to create ambitious work covering all genres.

Working with the the Bambanani Group in South Africa, Unlimited Global Alchemy explored the psychology and politics of HIV/AIDS through a series of collaborative artworks, film and workshops. Work from the project is now permanently exhibited in Mandela’s Walk to Freedom in Cape Town.

Luke Jennings in a Guardian review of Gadsden's project Unlimited Global Alchemy said: “Gadsden is creating an artwork with frantic speed, fighting her own real-life fight against the dying of the light. In the act of painting, she tells us, she is "living in the second". A profoundly affecting reminder of our shared humanity.”