Her interactions with Pete Cooper, UK director of Hammerson, the property company that owns the Bullring, were her greatest disappointment, she says. “I don’t think I ever got to the bottom of why they said yes,” she says. She says that Channel 4 and Firecrest, the producers, sounded out a number of venues before the Bullring agreed. Given Maclean’s ad-busting hinterland, it’s perhaps a wonder that any shopping centre allowed her within its bounds. There’s something cheeky that I find strangely empowering in being these grotesque characters.” But grotesqueness can be achieved quite easily and purposefully. “There’s a strange power in the grotesque, instead of trying to achieve beauty – and the standards of beauty as set at this level where it is entirely unachievable, and purposely so because if it was achievable you maybe wouldn’t want to keep buying these things to look better. Maclean’s costumes are artworks in themselves, exhaustingly elaborate, made in garish colours, with jarring details such as accentuated teeth, overly wide eyes or melting skin. “Gender identity, particularly for women, traps you into a very narrow, restrictive idea of what beauty is, but dressing up and performance allow you to play with it.” “I’ve always thought dressing up was fun, ever since I was a kid,” she says. Not that Maclean’s work could ever be described as po-faced: it is infused with playfulness and cheek. The final piece of work is, if anything, enriched by her struggles her tangible rage, in particular at the way women’s bodies are variously used by consumer capitalism, remains undiminished. Like her other work, the film uses green-screen technology and digital editing while Maclean herself lip-syncs to a prerecorded soundtrack. In the resulting film, Maclean uses prosthetics and a hand-stitched costume to recreate herself as the marauding Satisfaction Bunny, a nursery monstrosity with viciously sharp teeth, who romps through an alternate Bullring universe peopled with tantrum-throwing shoppers craving brands, their logos censored with pixels. Rachel Maclean in her studio: ‘The minute you’re dumped into a shopping centre you feel so strangely powerless.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian “A lot of large corporations are financially bigger than some nations, more powerful than governments, but if we weren’t permitted to satirise governments using their own iconography then that would seem like a hard level of censorship.” It was a worthy target, as Maclean points out. So eventually the only way was to make art about the level of censorship around these brands.” What I hadn’t considered is that these places feel like a public space, but the minute you try to critique or satirise it you hit up against all these things: I wasn’t allowed to film in shops, I couldn’t make work inspired by certain shops legally – the possible avenues for making art were narrowed down. “Every idea I had and everything I tried to do gradually seemed less possible. Having worked in retail, she is well aware of the slog of customer service.)Ī year on from the residency, Maclean’s frustration is far more transparent than it is in the documentary. Even then, she was limited to asking the manager two pre-approved questions: “Tell me about Smiggle?” and “How long have you worked here?” (It should be noted that Maclean remains entirely respectful of Bullring employees. The only brand that would allow her to film in its shop was Smiggle, purveyor of unicorn-embossed children’s stationery that shares much of its aesthetic with Maclean’s. The film tracks Maclean’s thwarted attempts to engage creatively with her surroundings. I had dinner every night at Leon and even the food can be saturated by that strange environment.” It’s an entire culture that necessitates dissatisfaction.”įeeding herself became a similarly suffocating experience: “I had Cafe Nero, Pret a Manger, and Leon. It has to make you feel bad in order that you buy something to make yourself feel better. “There’s something about shopping centres and the whole experience of advertising that is anxiety-inducing. With her background in satirising the excesses of consumer culture, as with the infantilised adults and horror children in 2015’s Feed Me, one might imagine that Maclean would have tougher armour than most, but the relentless visuals of consumption took their toll.
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