Lecturer in Creative Media (Photography)

Trained in Fine Art, Rae uses photography, text and sound to explore representation, femininity, consumer culture and the everyday.

Previous mixed media publications include A Real Work of Art and Kurl up n Dye, a monograph published by Wild Pansy Press with an introduction by Simon Grennan and incorporating photographs and typography investigating the vernacular in British high street culture. A feature on the book has aired on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour. The research has led to a number of conference papers and articles exploring the photographic image in terms of the vernacular, cultural anthropology and material culture.
The Grammar of Glamour; Shooting the High Street involves an investigation into the materiality of photographic media. The project uses experimental visual ethnography that explores relationships between material culture, social space and the street.

Current work in progress is Portrait of a Woman and Searching for Leo. At her mothers death Rae inherited photographs and letters which pointed to an interesting family history. At the work’s centre are the memories of life in Basque Spain in the 1930s. One of these stories is the discovery that her grandfather was a photographer in San Sebastián, Bilbao, Zaragoza and Madrid 1909-1948.

Artist Website  www.inesrae.com

Teaching and research is in the area of contemporary photographic practice with a particular interest in the role of women within representation. Ines contributes to the BA (Hons) Creative Media programme in the areas of Collaborative Practice, Narratives and Social Context and contributes to the Critical Theory programme and Dissertation Supervision.
She has also supervised postgraduate students with interests in feminist art practice, class cultures and documentary photography practices. 

Qualifications:

MA Social History of Art, University of Leeds 
BA Fine Art, Brighton Polytechnic

Research interests

Projects:

2024, PI, Searching for Leo: Creative uses of ‘the archive’ in a place of remembering and forgetting. AHRC Impact Initiation Fund

Collaborators: Maddi Elorza, Universidad Pais Vasco, Bilbao and Marcelino Altuna, Photomuseum, Zarautz, San Sebastian

https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/place/searching-for-leo

2024-2025 Awarded a place on Literature Works WordSpace talent development programme for 2024-2025 for creative non fiction and photography project Searching for Leo.

Research around memory, archives and autoethnographic practice impacts on how we think about therelationship between the past and now. This has a wider influence on strategies for health and well-being. Some of the content I am dealing with relates specifically to the traumas of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), as a personal history,but also in relation to the nation state and its ability to process that trauma. The methodologies adopted have a significance which go beyond the immediate reference of the project and might be utilised in other communities and civic groups to address how we experience personal and collective history through the examination and interpretation of archive material.

Taking as a starting point the discovery that my grandfather was a photographer for the Nationalist Propaganda division during the civil war, and my great-uncle fought for the Republicans, the work aims to broaden the understanding of how families and communities come to terms with these tensions in a context where forgetting has been the main impulse. Given the prevalence of absence, gaps and silence in many of these stories, alternate truths have sometimes replaced and reconstructed memories from the past.

Work from the Searching for Leo project will be exhibited at Photomuseum, Zarautz, Donostia-San Sebastián in September 2025.

2024 Cremyll Commuters Soundwork made with collaborator Laura Denning for activateCHAT 2024

This 8 minute sound piece tells the stories of the 8 minute crossing between Cremyll in Cornwall to Plymouth (Devon). Many people use this ferry to commute to and from work, and these are their stories.

2021, Awarded Arts Council England funding from Developing your Creative Practice scheme May 2021 for Portrait of a Woman

Current ongoing work in progress is Portrait of a Woman. At my mothers death I inherited photographs and letters which pointed to an interesting family history. At the work’s centre are the memories of life in Basque Spain in the 1930s embedded in particular stories passed down to me by my mother.  Work was shown in 2021 as part of Family Ties 10th anniversary exhibition at UCA Farnham.

Selected Past Projects

Rae's research aims to analyse the labour of femininity in a contemporary photographic culture where this still remains largely invisible. A Real Work of Art uses a model of image-making which is largely dialogic and interactive in its involvement of participants. This piece established a lot of the groundwork for subsequent research, especially in terms of methodology. central to this is the relationship between photographer and subject. A Real Work of Art explores the business of surface appearances through portraits of women whose job it is to crete a facade. The work visually describes a number of retail sites as consisting of both consumption and production.

The Grammar of Glamour explores the business of surface appearances through the use of imagery within independently owned businesses concerned with the manufacture of glamour. The intention is to ask how the spell of glamour can be broken. And at the same time how the power of material objects can transform the identity and status of those who own them. We cannot now begin to imagine what non-photographic glamour might be like, but we can ask what it represents within an economic, political, even philosophical, system. 
“…the fashion object …reveals how far we, as consumers, are from perfection. Fashion’s reminder of fragile mortality is perhaps shard with art, both manifesting fatality – their own failures to endure and to satisfy our desires – in the circulation of common tropes and shared lifestyles.” Chris Townsend Rapture: Arts Seduction by Fashion p8

With Martin O'Brien, UCLan Remembering the City; On memory, experience and the urban landscape
My interest in memory work has developed from a small project called ‘Memory City’. The project investigates the relationshipsbetween personal memory, everyday experience and public space. Its focus is on narratives of security andinsecurity, anxiety and confidence, and belonging and alienation in the urbanlandscape. Using a sequence of themed workshops the project focuses on: thepleasures, risks and dangers of city life; mobility and the cosmopolitan city;and cultural landscapes of the city. The aim is to see how people use theirmemories to construct their understandings of public space in the present.
Funded by Sandbox/Uclan 2009. 

With Claire Corrin and Daniella Watson ‘Inbetween Spaces’ Funded by Arts Council England (£13,000) Completed 2007 (Lead Applicant: Rae)

Inbetween Spaces (2007), explores ideas of marginality on several billboard sites around Manchester and Salford. The bus tour explored the marginal and overlooked in the urban fabric through the rehearsed performance of a tour guide.

With Simon Grennan and Alan Ward ‘Kurl up n Dye; an exploration of the vernacular in British high street culture’ Funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council (£5000) and UCLan (match funding) Completed November 2006 (Lead Applicant: Rae)

In Kurl up n Dye there is a nod to the motifs and pictorial strategies from which other photographers work: There is a long tradition in using photography to document and explore aspects of British popular culture and sometimes with a nostalgia for disappearing worlds. But there is a point to be made here about the stories that don’t get told, or that need a differently skewed vision. Perhaps as Diane Arbus felt when she made the image of an interior of a barber shop there is always another way of seeing a place.
The shop names and typefaces signal economic status,class and taste beyond the frame. The humour in the shop names is self-directed, belonging entirely to the independent trader – to the lower rent, non-corporate, “other mainstream” undertaste that laughs at the aspiring by making deprecating laughter part of the pleasure of aspiration itself. The people and places in Kurl up n Dye understand the operation of glamour’s oxymoron in their lives, making use of the knife-edge between image and reality.
In 'Kurl up 'n' Dye', I think we are squarely in the sights of glamour.Or perhaps, Rae has her sights set on glamour. Either way, we seem more than anything to be looking down the barrel of a gun, which is curious, seeing as the images in ''Kurl up 'n' Dye' ' have been made within the pleasure industry,at the salon. Nobody seems to be having much fun in the peopled interiors that contribute to the work. The salon facades also appear either dreary or shabby.The conventions of documentary photography are assaulted by Rae in 'Kurl up 'n'Dye', not discarded or ignored, so that the private views, the intimate views and the set-up images still seem motivated by a desire to reveal social relationships…
Simon Grennan in Kurl up n Dye 2006 

With Jo Lansley, Manchester Metropolitan University ‘Settling In’ Funded by Arts Council England (£11,000) Completed April 2006 (Lead Applicant: Rae)
Settling In explores ideas of home and performativity.Using a tradition of artist-led initiatives the research aimed to reassess the diversity of artistic practice funded by the Arts Council in Manchester and to introduce new artists and work to the region, particularly female practitioners. The exhibition was intended as a comment on the corporate extravaganza that is the British Art Show.
Taking home as it’s starting point Settling In explores how we move within and experience this most intimate of spaces – the home becomes a metaphor for the creative process, a locus for female activity, as well as a place of secrets and self, of rituals and routine. 

Talks and Conference Presentations

2024 Soundwork Cremyll Commuters a homage to the Cremyll Ferry, made with Laura Denning, for ActivateCHAT, University of Plymouth 7-10 November 2024

2024 Searching for Leo: Creative uses of the archive for Reframing the archive 26-27 September, International Conference on Photography and Visual Culture 5th edition. Archival practices in Contemporary Visual Arts, Online conference organised by Archivo Platform and the Archivo Papers journal.

2024 Homage to the Cremyll Ferry and Postcards from a Commute presented at Navigating the Waters ECR Celebration Awayday/symposium, University of Plymouth June 2024

2024 Creative uses of the archive in a place of remembering and forgetting, AHRC IAA Impact Showcase Presentation, The Foulston room, The Box, Plymouth, June 2024

2022 Storytelling and Trauma, Progressive Connections, Athens 9th and 10th July 2022

2022 A Right to Roam   International Conference of Auto Ethnography Bristol 18th and 19th July 2022

2022 Past, Present, Future  BSA Auto/Biography Conference Oxford 13th - 15th July 2022

2018 Visual cultures, consumerism and the grammar of glamour, Sociology Research Seminar Series at Plymouth University, Feb 21 2018

2018 Undertaking Effective Community Engagement Through Community-Led Research: The Maker Memories Project, Guildhall, Plymouth

2017 (Our) Generations and (Expanded) Geographies: Living Feminist Lives for A Feminist Space at Leeds; Looking back to Think forward December 16-17 2017, University of Leeds

2016 The Grammar of Glamour Part 2, Helsinki Photomedia: Materialities
2013 Remembering the City, Contemphoto'13, Istanbul
2012 The Grammar of Glamour, Helsinki Photomedia Conference, Aalto University
2010 Memory City; Remembering the City. MAPACA 2010, Alexandria VA. Urban Culture Panel
2009 Kurl up n Dye; the vernacular in British High Street culture. Northernness; Ideas and Images of the North in Visual Culture, University of Northumbria
2009 Shear Class; an ethnographic study of the British hair salon. MAPACA , Boston. Urban Culture Panel
2008 Some will pay (for what others will pay to avoid): Vernacular typography and the irreverence of popular culture. Networks of Design, University College, Falmouth
2008 Kurl up n Dye; the vernacular in British High Street culture. The Street, University of California at Irvine
2006 Towards an Ethics of Gnerosity in Contemporary Photographic Practice. North West Art and Design Research Seminar, Liverpool John Moores University
2004 AHRB and A Real Work of Art; Practice as Research.North West Art and Design Research Seminar, Cumbria Institute of the Arts, Carlisle.

Conferences Organised:

Place Culture and Identity, Arts Research seminar, University of Plymouth February 2024 with Dr Kayla Parker and Dr Mary Pearson 

About Place, Arts Research symposium, University of Plymouth June 2023 co-convened with Dr Kayla Parker and Dr Mary Pearson 

Mapping; The Land/Water Summer Symposium, University of Plymouth July 2013 co-convened with Dr Heidi Morstang

Other Academic Activities:

2015 Visiting Scholar, New York University, Tisch School of the Arts
2012-19 Faculty of Arts and Humanities Ethics Committee, Plymouth University
2012-19 Faculty of Arts and Humanities Equality and Diversity Committee, Plymouth University
2003-2010 Pathway Leader in Photography in MA Fine Art, University of Central Lancashire
2000-03 Course Leader MA Fine Art in Print, Photographic and Time-based Media, University of Central Lancashire
1997-00 Photography Pathway Leader MA Art and Design, University of Derby