Rachael Hulme is an artist, art educator, and researcher living and teaching in Baltimore, Maryland. She holds a BFA in Photography and her Master of Arts in Teaching from the Maryland Institute College of Art. In 2014, she was awarded the Jan Meyer ’87 Traveling Fellowship and traveled the Southeastern United States for her project, “Lessons”, documenting empty K-12 schools, classrooms, and the teachers, students and staff who used to inhabit them. In 2015, she was the recipient of the Patricia Lion Krongard Award in Art Education and has presented on her research in contemporary photographic education at regional and national conferences, including MSDE PDS, SPE National, and the Maryland Art Education Association Conference. Currently a full-time faculty member at a public high school in Maryland, she teaches photography to a thoughtful and diverse group of student image-makers.
Constructivism
As an early-career art teacher, much of my time is spent navigating the process of being an educator while simultaneously maintaining my personal studio practice. In “Constructivism”, I indulge my lifelong love for collecting the physical and the ephemeral through playful, eccentric still life constructions of items and memories salvaged from my proceeding school day within the walls of my classroom.
Inspired by daily interactions with my students and fellow staff, on-going systemic budget cuts, classroom materials, and the small, custodian-swept piles of trash that dot the hallways after students have left for the day, I create allegorical still-life scenes that reflect my experience in public education. Tinkering with gravity, color, and the quickly disappearing afternoon light as materials to be manipulated alongside my found objects, I seek for these photographic vignettes to feel nostalgic and vaguely familiar, drawing on my viewers’ collective shared memories of K-12 school days past and present.
To view more of Rachael Hulme’s work please visit her website.