Rachel Hutchison, Venice Fellow 2024

"My time in Venice has gifted me with a renewed sense of being really P*ssed Off"

In 2024 Outer Spaces began working with the British Council as a partner on their Venice Fellowships programme. As Outer Spaces Fellow, Edinburgh based artist, Rachel Hutchison spent a month at the Venice Biennale, conducting a self-directed research project alongside working as an Exhibition Ambassador at the British Pavilion.

We asked Rachel to reflect on her time as a Fellow and the months that followed her return. We are so grateful for Rachel for sharing her thoughts, illustrating the realities of her experience as a working class artist in today's society. Rachel’s words only fuel our drive to support the professional development of visual artists. Our mission is to create multiple pipelines of progression for artists at any stage of their career through an alternative infrastructure for the arts. Our radically inclusive approach removes financial barriers and empowers artists to expand their practice. Still, we know there is so much work the sector has to do to create equality of access to opportunities and a sustainable arts ecology.

Reflections on My Venice Fellowship, Rachel Hutchison

My time in Venice has gifted me with a renewed sense of being really P*ssed Off.

This past August I had the incredibly exciting honour and privilege of representing Outer Spaces and the British Council as a fellow of the British Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Opportunities such as this, are few and far between in the arts. To stand in such a prestigious space and unapologetically take up space as myself was profoundly validating, especially as someone who has picked up a few disproportionately represented labels along the way: scottish, neurodivergent, queer, working class.

As a young[er] person I was actively discouraged from considering the arts as a sensible career choice, And, to be fair, that advice wasn’t wildly off the mark. With fewer than one in ten arts workers in the UK coming from working-class roots (Healy, 2024), breaking into the scene post-art school has been an uphill climb. After two years and hundreds of rejected applications, this fellowship was the first time I truly felt seen - not just as someone with potential, but as a “real artist,” a professional qualified to be there.

In Venice, I engaged with international audiences—visitors, VIPs, and art professionals alike. Explaining and answering questions about the exhibition in English, basic French, and even learning snippets of Italian, I witnessed art’s ability to be a universal language, and a means of human connection.

As part of the fellowship, we were tasked with conducting a research project during our time. I arrived with an overwhelming array of ideas, but I found myself returning to a project I had initiated during my undergraduate studies: exploring the personification of emotions and the use of adjectives to articulate them beyond the binaries of “good” and “bad.” Prompting interviewees with themes like “soft,” “fast,” “heavy,” or “slow” emotions, I conducted interviews with my fellow fellows about the complexities of their feelings. This deepened my understanding of how emotions are experienced and articulated across cultures and has since become the foundation of my current artistic practice—creating painted figures to represent complex emotions.

The preliminary results of this research can be seen on my Instagram (@rachelhutchison.art), where I shared a voice clip representing overlapping audio snippets from these interviews. While this research remains dormant in its artistic evolution since my return to Scotland, it continues to shape how I approach both my personal work and my new role as Retail and Artist Liaison Manager at One Dalkeith, a community development trust. In this position, I support local artists and the wider community, and I’m personally committed to creating avenues for young artists to explore art as a viable career. Through shared dialogue and community art initiatives, I hope to demonstrate the power of creativity and connection.

Despite the immense pride I feel for completing the fellowship, the realities of returning home have been sobering. Without the officiating lanyard around my neck, I’ve faced the ongoing battle of feeling acknowledged for the skills and experiences artists bring to the table. The lack of accessible opportunities like this fellowship remains a pressing issue.

My time in Venice was wonderful, purposeful, and gifted me with a renewed sense of being really P*ssed Off. This frustration isn’t directed at the experience itself , but at the systemic underfunding, undervaluing of the arts and the lack of accessible opportunities like it. The arts are under threat, squeezed by an economy that emphasises the need to be capitalised upon. For instance, there was no Scottish Pavilion on the world stage of the Venice Biennale this year due to budget cuts. Creativity and expression are innately human, and neglecting, underfunding, or devaluing these skills means losing so much of what makes life meaningful and colorful. Art’s value is inherent, not something that needs to be capitalised upon to be justified.

What Outer Spaces is doing to support early-career artists matters, as does every effort to bridge the gap between the privileged and the marginalised in the arts. This fellowship gave me a renewed sense of fight because the arts—and the countless stories, identities, and expressions they represent—are worth it.