Rachy McEwan’s first solo show
Dates: 27-30 November 2025
Private view: Thursday 27 November, 6-9 pm
Venue: 309 Bethnal Green Rd, London E2
How do we remember a tree once it has been felled, forgotten, or paved over. In her debut solo exhibition, Rachy McEwan invites us to hold that question in both hands, across paint and pixel. Money Trees: I’m a Ghost Now, Look How You Hold Me pairs oil-on-canvas paintings with their digital counterparts, each one derived from 3D scans of London trees that no longer stand. The result is a quietly radical act of care, where preservation takes shape in colour and code, memory and material.
Paint and pixel, side by side
This new body of work emerges from Money Trees, a platform that links digital tree assets to real-world tree care. For this final iteration, McEwan translates community-gathered scans into textured digital models, then unwraps each model into a UV map. Those two-dimensional surfaces are converted from pixels to centimetres, stretched onto canvas, and painted by hand. The finished canvases are scanned back into the model, completing a loop that moves from street to screen to studio and back again.
Seen together in the gallery, each pairing reads like a dialogue between presence and absence. The paintings carry the touch, time, and labour of the artist. The digital works carry the trace, location, and data of a living organism that once shaped a street, cast a shadow, hosted a nest. McEwan’s exhibition suggests that remembrance can be both embodied and networked, both archival and alive.
A platform for urban ecology
At its heart, Money Trees proposes new ways to value urban trees. Earlier experiments explored tokenised ownership inspired by projects like Terra0, but McEwan has shifted the emphasis toward accessible, human-scale participation. Paintings, digital assets, and zines will be available to purchase, with proceeds directed back into community tree care and replanting. In a city where ecological decisions are often made out of view, I’m a Ghost Now, Look How You Hold Me reframes ownership as stewardship, and collecting as an act of maintenance.
Process, community, and care
Money Trees has always been as much process as product. Participants use mobile photography to document trees from multiple angles, submitting image sets to a cloud archive. McEwan reconstructs these into three-dimensional models, refines and textures them, then builds the interactive environment that situates each tree within London’s geography. The studio practice that follows is slow and tactile, a counterpoint to the speed of computation. Brushwork meets machine vision, and the city’s living architecture is remembered across systems that are technical, social, and deeply personal.
Why it matters now
London is a forest city in all but name. Street trees regulate heat, capture carbon, soak up flood water, and anchor neighbourhood identity. When a mature tree is lost, we feel it. McEwan’s work meets that feeling with a new language for mourning and a practical route for action. By linking art to on-the-ground care, I’m a Ghost Now, Look How You Hold Me turns the gallery into a place where ecological memory is kept, shared, and funded.
Visit the show
Money Trees: I’m a Ghost Now, Look How You Hold Me
When: 27-30 November 2025
Private view: Thursday 27 November, 6-9 pm
Where: 309 Bethnal Green Rd, London E2
In partnership with: London National Park City
For sale: paintings, digital assets, and zines
More on the project: money-trees.uk
Save the dates and bring your wallets. Every purchase supports community tree care.
About the artist
Rachy McEwan (b. 1997) is a London-based interdisciplinary artist and researcher working across painting, programming, 3D imaging, and interactive design. She graduated with a First-Class BA in Painting and Printmaking from The Glasgow School of Art in 2020, receiving the RSA New Contemporaries Award, and earned a Distinction in MA Material Futures at UAL: Central Saint Martins in 2024, where she was shortlisted for the Maison/0 LVMH Award. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Saatchi Gallery and the Royal Scottish Academy, with recent and upcoming presentations such as Money Trees at Tallinn Design Festival and Dark but Dendrophilia at RestlessEgg in London. She has contributed to public conversations on ecology and digital culture through platforms including the London National Park City x openAREA Podcast, The Makers Memo, and the Visual Artists Ireland Conference.
