Rachel Newton - solo artist photography

So the centre piece here - apart from Rachel of course - is a ginormous harp made from fallen, half rotten tree limbs. This construction came about from a some what tangential process; originally I wanted to cram Rachel in a box, something I've had in mind to do for ages. However after many failed attempts to make an aesthetically pleasing box from these rotten limbs a harp sort of magically appeared through structural necessity.  Serendipitous?!?!? I had quite the time wandering the the misty woods up the Khyber pass in Mugdock, selecting branches I liked the look of, hauling them to the car and seeing if they'd fit together. I got right in tune with my inner caveman/hippy. It was fun and a great antidote to my usual task of staring at a monitor in the office. Once I got all this timber back to the workshop I sat out in the car park trying various different ways of lashing, nailing and zip tying. In the end big fence staples gave the answer and after about 6 hours of picking woodlouse out of my hair and rehousing millipedes and worms I had something that resembled something. I tried to move it from the car park to the workshop on the big palette truck and the whole thing collapsed. This is when the master stroke of using fishing line came in to being and I spent the rest of the evening lashing the thing together. In the end it had 25m of stuff on it and it wasn't until I set up the flashes that I realised I had actually created something that might actually work. A good day spend doing something out of the ordinary , creating something original, creative and interesting.So the next night Rachel turned up, I had pre warned her that she would be caged in said forest harp and that I would be covering her in vaseline and spraying her with water. And do you know what? she was totally cool with it. Because she is cool! What mighty craic it was, I was up a ladder half the time and she was contorted in the soggy rotten mess that was all about the floor. It was fun, a wee creative adventure in an industrial unit in port dundas. We were there till 3 in the morning, there were costume changes. I wrecked some old filters with water and vaseline and Rachel got soaked, cold and tired. We finished at half 3 in the morning, wheeling the 8 foot forest harp outside and wilfully destroyed it. It sounded shit anyway and it had served it's purpose.Rachel's new album is in the works as we speak. Design is almost done and I also had the great pleasure of hanging out at Caribou Recording - Mattie Foulds new studio - during the tracking for the album, so a making of documentary is also in the pipeline. Seriously the album sounds brilliant, all trad songs framed in a stark and brilliant modern light. Mattie has done a great job on the production and playing the drums and I'm pretty sure this will be a seminal album of the nu folk genre (if such a genre even exists?!?!?). You should very much look forward to it's release, it is not often people undertake projects these days with such creative abandon. Rachel is brave, tough and extremely talented!