Sarah Neely and Sarah Smith – The art of maximal ventriloquy: Femininity as labour in the films of Rachel Maclean

Using a mixture of green screen and recycled audio texts from a range of recognisable sources - including films, television advertisements, chat shows and TV dramas such as Sex and the City and Downton Abbey – Rachel Maclean’s video works share an aesthetic with a variety of online texts, from virtual worlds to mash-ups. Often, the weird and wonderful array of characters played by MacLean serve as ventriloquists for contemporary culture, enabling her to excavate the saccharine surfaces of the popular culture that she presents in order to reveal the more grotesque and disturbing seam running beneath. This chapter focuses on MacLean’s work as a feminist critique, positioning her within a history of women performance artists and considers how the intensive labour of her own performances foregrounds a wider consideration of the ‘work’ of performances of femininity in contemporary culture. Furthermore, it will examine how MacLean’s explorations of marginalised gendered online spaces, and their own existence as a space for the formation and performance of identity, connect to the wider debates around the Internet, utopianism and participatory culture.