Rachel Gadsden
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Rachel Gadsden is a UK-based multi-award winning visual artist and performance artist who is exhibited internationally and who works across the mainstream and disability art sectors. Gadsden has led a range of national and international participative programmes exploring themes of fragility and resilience.[1] She has had a lung condition all her life and is injected by a syringe driver at one-minute intervals with the medication she needs to keep her alive.[2]
Education
Gadsden's artistic career began with the support of a Prince's Youth Business Trust Award (1988). 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.[3]
History
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.[4]
In 2012 Gadsden won an award from the Arts Council’s Unlimited[5] programme, designed to support disabled artists across the UK to create ambitious work covering all genres.
Working with 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.[citation needed]
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.”[6]
Awards
- 2014 Breakthrough UK National Independent Living Award Influencing disabled people’s participation in Society 2014 Shortlisted European Diversity Award – Hero of the Year
- 2013 National Diversity Award 2013 – Positive Role Model for Disability
- 2011 “Commended” International Freedom to Create competition. (Cape Town SA)
- 2009 International DadaAward 2009 Artist of the Year Award
- 2005 DadaAward 2005 Visual Artist of the Year
References
- ^ Gadsden, Rachel. "Disability Arts International". Disability Arts International. British Council. Retrieved 3 March 2016.
- ^ Gadsden, Rachel. "Push Me Please". Push Me Please. Watershed. Retrieved 3 March 2016.
- ^ Gadsden, Rachel. "Homepage". Rachel Gadsden.
- ^ "Disability Arts International". British Council. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
- ^ "ACE". Arts Council. Arts Council England. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
- ^ Jennings, Luke (9 September 2012). "Unlimited Global Academy – review". The Guardian. Retrieved 3 December 2015.