Join us for the first seminar of our 2022/23 Autumn Series! We’ll be hearing from Rachel Carter, Sculptor and Artist, with her talk on ‘Standing In This Place: Challenging the 5%’, in which she will share how she has been changing and shaking up the field of sculpture with her feminist and women-centric works.
Wednesday, 14 September 2022, 4pm GMT+1/BST
Sign up on Zoom here.
‘Standing In This Place: Challenging the 5%’
Standing In This Place is new bronze sculpture by Rachel Carter depicting two entwined female figures inspired by historic research of the textile mills of the Industrial Midlands and the enslaved working the cotton fields in America.
For Rachel, this starting point of the project was when she was delving into the lives of her paternal ancestors working at the Darley Abbey Cotton Mill in the 1800s who felt the devastation of losing siblings to Cotton Lung. This led her to volunteer to assist the historians and community working on the Slave Trade Legacy Project.
Informed by the historical research of the University of Nottingham, Bright Ideas Nottingham and the Black-led community group Legacy Makers, the sculpture and exhibitions will address the contribution of these women, ask questions about our shared history, uncover stories and provide an opportunity to learn from the past.
The challenging history of the Midlands is one that should not be hidden, and using the stories of our ancestors, we have the chance to educate – not mis-educate – about the contributions that the working class and enslaved labour force have made to the Midlands.
About the Speaker
Sculptor Rachel Carter works from The Garden Studio on the Derbyshire / Nottinghamshire border, creating large scale sculpture for the garden and smaller intimate sculptures for the home using the lost wax technique to create bronze works. Throughout her professional practice, since graduating with a BA Hons in Applied Arts, she has found myself driven by process and material in sculpture.
For the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower sailing in 2020, she was commissioned to create a new series of work for the Pilgrim Roots districts. The ‘Pilgrim Woman’ sculptures combine her hand woven work alongside community weaving which is cast in bronze. Alongside this, a plus-life size pilgrim stands in the Danum Gallery, Doncaster, a smaller version on the banks of the River Trent in Gainsborough, and a third Pilgrim Sculpture in Boston, Massachusetts.
