Meg is an artist whose work is concerned with the social and ethical implications of various forms of technically produced images.
Meg's practice utilises traditional and digital printmaking techniques as well as handmade textiles. She has exhibited artwork and presented research internationally. In 2017 and 2018, she was the invited artist-in-residence at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford.
Meg studied at Mount St Mary’s University (BA 2002) and the University of Delaware (MFA 2005) in the USA. She completed her PhD in Printmaking at RCA in 2015 for her practice-led research project, Material-Digital Resistance: Towards a Tactics of Visibility.
She has taught at University of Delaware and Mount St Mary’s University, as well as De Montfort University where she led Digital Arts and Fine Art MA programmes. She joined the RCA as Tutor in Print in the School of Arts and Humanities in 2019.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
Expertise
Gallery
More information
Practice
Meg’s practice-led artistic research considers the relationship of the vast and the infinitesimal to the human scale of perception as it plays out in the production of technical images of varying types, including both digital and analogue forms of print. She is interested in the effects of digital materiality on everyday life, and the fluidity that underpins contemporary everyday image production. Recent research considers the differing ethics of image production in artistic and scientific contexts respectively, and in particular the role of restraint in processes of looking.
Her artistic practice uses reproducible printed and textile forms to foreground the particulate constitution of the seemingly continuous. Using crochet techniques to hand-digitise images, she explores the disparity between human and computer scales of image-making. This work is often juxtaposed with the slick, physical surface of digital print in order to interrogate presumptions of continuity or integrity in the image.
In recent work, Meg takes scientific image making as a starting point for critical reflection on the practice of print as a research methodology. While in residence at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, she became interested in the diffraction images produced in X-ray crystallography, a process used to ascertain the shape of a molecule. She responds to the indexical yet intermediary status of the diffraction image in the production of scientific knowledge, through a series of blind-embossed crocheted forms. This ongoing research explores the potential for the space of the print to be one that anticipates knowledge of a different kind.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Solo and Two-person Exhibitions
- Reciprocal Space (2018). University Church of St Mary and St Ann's College, University of Oxford.
- Framed Expanse (2016). The Cube Gallery, Leicester.
- The Distance Home (2014). Coleman Project Space, London.
Group Exhibitions
- Bienal Douro, 9th International Printmaking Biennial (2018). Douro, Portugal.
- Global Print 3 (2017). Douro, Portugal.
- Conjunctively Evolving (2016). Yun Contemporary Arts Centre, Shanghai, China.
- Intersecting Practices of Contemporary Printmaking in the UK (2015). China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China.
- Rahaim, M. (2014). ‘RCA Show’, Royal College of Art, London, UK.
Publications
- Rahaim, M. (2018) ‘Depresentation, Re-presentation’, in Chance, V. and Ganley, D. (eds.), Re:Print, editors Veronique Chance and Duncan Ganley, London: Marmalade Publishers.
- Rahaim, M. (2016) ‘Notes on the Inversion of Photographic Transparency: Excerpts from "Waking Ouroboros"’, PROVA: The Royal College of Art Humanities Research Forum Journal, 3, pp. 141–146.
- Rahaim, M. (2014) ‘The invisibility of print…’ in Graham, H. and Chong, W. (eds.) The Invisible Lens, London: Royal College of Art, pp. 6–9.
Conferences and Symposia
- Rahaim, M. (2015) ‘Under the Canyon’, digital inkjet print, in Ho, W. (ed.) Fold [Box Set], IMPACT, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China, 22–26 September 2015.
- Rahaim, M. (2015) ‘Depresentation/Re-presentation’, Re:Print/Re:Present, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, 9 July 2015.
- Rahaim, M. (2015) ‘Artifact of Vision’, digital inkjet print, in Ho, W. (ed.) Distortion [Box Set], Southern Graphics Council International, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA, 18–21 March 2015.
- Rahaim, M. (2015) ‘Waking Ouroboros’, Technological Gaze: Speculations, Royal College of Art, London, UK, 13 March 2015.
- Rahaim, M. (2014) ‘Scribal Drift: On the hand making of a digital image-object’, Critical Practices and Experimentation, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, 24–25 May 2014.
- Rahaim, M. (2014) ‘On handmaking the digital image’, i-Scan, The Blue Coat Gallery, Liverpool, UK, 26 April 2014.
External collaborations
- Artist in Residence, Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, 2017–2018
During this year-long residency, the artist was embedded in a scientific research centre in order to make art in response the work of the centre. Observations of lab science and conversations with researchers inspired the production of a body of printed artworks later exhibited in the historic University Church of St Mary’s as part of the Oxford Science and Ideas Festival in October 2018, and subsequently at St Ann’s College, Oxford in November 2018.
