Seòras [George Daniel] [mac] Rae (b. 1990) is a sculptor who lives and works in Glasgow UK. In his twenties under the guiding resonance of tutors such as Peter Kenard, Wada Leo Smith, and Don Sylvester Houlard, Rae’s work grappled with the colours and imagination of the German post-expressionist palette, inventing works that engaged outside space irrespective of permission. Rae worked materially with found objects, clay, sound, and text. Often recreating natural forms that dried and cracked, the work aimed to address transubstantiation and the classical tenets of beauty as informed by Nietzsche’s The Gay Science.
Developing a sound practice informed by the agnostic liturgy of Paul Preciado and echoing the sculptural forms, Rae’s work pushed further into the ephemeral to express emotional intensity over rational harmony, using the mixing of levels as an underlying value and power relation in the construction of composition.
Rae’s recent work takes the form of figurative and symbolic storytelling. The works weave multiple narratives surrounding civil rights, partnership, green energy, war, and cataclysm. They are told predominantly through animals as represented in medieval manuscript illumination.
This shift in practice toward states of formal permanence should be interpreted as the synthesis between the thesis of the ephemeral and the counter-thesis of experiences under the canon of British abstract sculptors. There is an energetic and unified aspect to Rae’s enigmatic scenes; his figures appear in an event as it unfolds, or else waiting for something else to happen.
The work offers an understanding of predictive history through a narrative framework. The densely carved furs and smooth, oiled skin express vanity and complacency, yet these qualities are also the focus of his subjects’ countenances within their stances of defiance and nudity—suggesting collective resilience in the face of political rupture.
Rae’s recent mezzo-basso reliefs transpose allegorical or commemorative traditions of Western cultural heritage onto actors living under the shadow of contemporary crisis. They seek to contribute to cultural engagement with profound moral questions and aim to help rebuild intermediary institutions through the reopening of tradition and formal tenet. Seoras is married with the artist Moira Salt and together they have two children who attend the local gaelic primary school.