Image courtesy of the artist

Rachel McManus

Rachel MacManus is a visual artist based in Co Clare, Ireland. Rachel works through drawing and performance. Her drawing takes the form of a community based collaborative practice which allows an ongoing exploration into the cultural and social nuances of her surroundings. Her performance practice employs endurance based tasks and repetitive action as a way to experience how it feels to be present in a space.

Rachel holds a Masters in Fine Art, Open College of the Arts (UCA) 2019 and a BA in Visual Communications, National College of Art and Design 1997 . She has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally including at 126 Artist Run Gallery (Galway), glór (Co Clare), Ps2 Studios (Belfast), Revision Festival (Belfast), FIX21 Catalyst Arts (Belfast), Die Kunstschaffenden Gallery, (Linz, Austria) and Musikhuset, (Gävle, Sweden)

Recent projects include Stretched- The Art of Motherhood, group show in People Museum Limerick and Ogham, a residency with Catalyst Arts, Belfast, (March 2022). As a 2021 recipient of the Arts Council Agility Award, Rachel is currently developing a triptych of site specific durational performance art works based in West Clare. As a founding member of the Co. Clare based collective The Negative Space, she is currently painting a series of public art works in Ennis Co Clare under the PRISM public art scheme.

My practice has two areas of focus- drawing and performance art. Each of these informs the other. My performative practice is strongly influenced by my previous life as a fitness instructor. I had to show up as an instructor on both the good days and the bad days and thus I became used to employing my body as an instructional tool. In my performances I use physical movement, particularly repetitive actions and endurance based tasks as a way to experience extremes, from endorphin based joy to exhaustion induced pain. Performance allows meto explore and reclaim space as a mid-life woman- to push, repeat and wrestle with the actions I make, presenting my body and its actions as a mission statement and as a declaration of my existence. My drawing practice is both how I record my surroundings, in particular how people take up space and hold themselves. Drawing facilitates an ongoing exploration into my environment and into the social nuances of my locality. My drawing practice helps me interpret and make sense of the world.

RACHELMACMANUS.ART

                                                                                             

Synaptic Space Biography, 2025

Synaptic Space is a performance art collective of two artists Olivia Hassett and Rachel Macmanus. With a wealth of prior solo and group performance experience Hassett and Macmanus set out early in 2024 to explore the overlaps in their practices. Synaptic Space creates a dialogue that mirrors and echoes back and forth the power of their dual energy exchange. Through action-based messaging, visual and colour symbolism they attempt, succeed, fail, and reattempt to harness this energy in their performative artworks. To date they have created a series of performances to camera. Choosing simple pared back tasks with call and response techniques, they focused their energy and research at the elusive, ever-changing boundaries of physical bodies, time and place. Most recently Synaptic Space launched a social media call out. As two women in their 50th year they wanted to explore the positive and challenging aspects of ageing through a performative lens. Synaptic Space is in the process of developing a new body of work exploring the collective responses received. They aim to highlight and champion that which is not regularly seen or expected from women of their age.

For more information please visit: https://rachelmacmanus.art/portfolio-items/synaptic-space/

Between, live performance to camera at Live Art Ireland, Tipperary, 2024. 

Stills taken from the video piece, focusing on the in between screens where the energy and image of our bodies merged, broke down and re-emerged.

Still images taken from You You, a live performance to camera at a Neolithic site in the Dublin  Mountains, 2024. 

This performance explored call and response actions and working in sync with each other. It  sought to engage with boundaries and consider the notion of charged spaces and pared back  physical actions