Featured artist in RPS To Shine a Light exhibition
From A Song Yet To Be Sung by Rachel Nixon (2023).
My series “A Song Yet To Be Sung” is part of the exhibition To Shine a Light / Who Dared to Dream at the Royal Photographic Society in the UK.
From A Song Yet To Be Sung by Rachel Nixon (2023).
The exhibition showcases the work of six contemporary female photographic artists from around the world. The show presents photographic projects which explore personal stories and histories or seek to effect wider change by raising awareness. The artists use a variety of approaches including documentary, conceptual, self-portraiture, landscape and the layering of images and AI-generated details.
“A Song Yet To Be Sung” is a meditation on the acceptance of growing older while resisting becoming invisible, and a rebuttal to oppressive online advertising for products to “fix” one’s menopausal “flaws”. In defiance of this attempted erasure, this project reframes female middle age through a set of 19 close-up images that combines self-portraits with captures of seemingly mundane nature and signs of everyday life.
For the artists appearing in this exhibition, photography is a means of shining a light on themselves, both as a tool for understanding and as one for engagement. The participating artists are: Fion Hung-Ching Yan, Ayesha Jones, Tasha Hylton, Trish Crawford ARPS, Caroline Fraser ARPS and Rachel Nixon.
The exhibition is inspired by Joy Gregory’s book Shining Lights: Black Women Photographers in 1980s–90s Britain which brings together work from 57 photographers.
To Shine a Light / Who Dared to Dream runs between 9th August and 29th September 2024, at the RPS Gallery in Bristol.