Rachael Allain’s artistic methodology allows for a reflection on the ruptures that exist between photographic lens and lens less optical devices. Her experiments use the temporal, photochemical properties of analogue film as well as the immediacy of rapidly evolving digital scientific imagery. In Mechanical Objectivity, Photography as Science and Art in Objectivity (Daston, 2015) the science historian Lorraine Daston explains how, even at the advent of photography in the 1800’s, Sir John Herschel recognised that ‘photography was ingeniously deployed to make visible phenomena otherwise invisible to the human eye’. Allain’s practice identifies a need to draw out the resonance of the horizon across different kinds of image making, including lens less pinhole photography, digital scientific visualization, and film.
Rachael Allain is an artist, researcher and lecturer based in the South West of the England, UK. Rachael holds an MA in Contemporary Art Practice and an MFA in Photographic Arts with distinction, is a member of Visual Arts Plymouth and Plymouth University Photography Research Group.
She exhibits her work both nationally and internationally and integrates emerging and obsolescent technologies. Her multidisciplinary practice incorporates both experimental still and moving image, sound and installation. Rachael’s experiments explore phenomenology in relation to site, the temporal, alchemical properties of analogue film as well as the immediacy of the virtual, scientific and digital data technology.