Small Screen Lovers: Rae Birch Carter

Rae Birch Carter

10 – 27 October 2024

Rae Birch Carter is an artist whose work incorporates the human face and body within a contemporary context. Working expressively, with freedom and spontaneity, Rae works with print, paint, drawing and collage.

Small Screen Lovers is an exhibition of monotype prints, created by the artist at the Artichoke Print Workshop, as part of ‘The Artichoke Print Prize’ awarded at Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair 2023.

Using the printing plate as a starting point, Rae adopts a spontaneous approach to mark making, applying colour, then wiping it, or washing it away, again and again, until all tangible meaning is erased and something ghostly and original emerges.

A deep, blue black is smeared around the glass, conjuring something mysterious and fundamental. Faces and figures emerge like fossils on the seabed, recalling those experiments with early photography and cyanotypes by Anna Atkins, ‘rhapsodies in blue’.

In another life, Rae works as a milliner, fabricating costumes and identities for film sets. This conjuring of character seeps into her artistic practice, in which a series of non- identifiable figures appear on the printing plate and are then erased and reworked multiple times to forge new identities, impressions and versions of each other. A torn- out picture from a newspaper might act as a starting point, but by the end of the process, the figure is nebulous, a blank on which anything can be projected.

Rae is fascinated by reality TV shows, with their ever-evolving carousel of participants, and observes with empathy the human interactions of people stretched to their limits. The figures in these monotypes emerge rather like an identikit character on such a reality programme, self-fabricated to create an unrecognisable version of themselves, hiding away their true, original identity by putting on a mask. Scrape away the layers, and who is hiding underneath?

The border of each print becomes a screen, a frame, a discreet space for the figure to inhabit. These prints and their figures are timeless. Unlike the filtered, Instagram - friendly faces of the twenty-first century, these faces could be of any time or place.

Some of Rae’s works sit within oval frames like eighteenth century miniatures.

In the gallery setting, the prints are placed in dialogue with each other. They could be people seated around a dinner table or hung on the walls of a salon. These ghostly, impressionistic faces could be anyone and everyone: a married couple holding a conversation, or anonymous passengers in a tube train carriage.

Unlike, perhaps, the American painter, Elizabeth Peyton, who uses found images of real people as source material, to create intimate, small scale portraits of friends, celebrities or historical figures, or the London-based painter, Kaye Donachie, who paints imaginary people, based on twentieth century literary figures, Rae is influenced by Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Drawing, especially life-drawing, is key to her practice. The faces portrayed in this series of monoprints, are oblique, pensive and fully unique.

© Alice Chasey 2024

Alice Chasey is a writer and editor specialising in contemporary art