Rachel Blackwell (born 1997, Aberdeen) is a Scottish artist based in Newcastle Upon Tyne. She graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design with a BA Hons in Fine Art in 2021. She now works for British sculptor Antony Gormley at his Hexham Foundry.
Inspired by archaeology, ecology, geology and mysticism, Blackwell is interested in folk practices and ritual. Exploring the tradition of divination, she researches and reappropriates ancient and mystical artefacts through digital excavations before sculpting in mediums of metal and stone.
Soothsayer is an ongoing project which questions how the tradition of divination is manifesting in relation to the Anthropocene, an unofficial unit of geologic time we now occupy. Blackwell proposes that sciences projection of the Anthropocene is like a modern day soothsaying, where peering into uncertain data and making predictions of speculative ecological futures has become the new divining.
