Online Photography alumna on founding film and photo festival
28 July 2026
Throughout the summer, Ryedale Film & Photo Fest is bringing a curated selection of photography, short films, talks and workshops to North Yorkshire, giving a platform to contemporary artists and their work.
Founded by MA Photography (Online) alumna Rachel Rimell, the festival showcases the creativity of fellow Falmouth alumni among other emerging and established artists in an exhibit covering a range of photography genres including documentary and street photography, analogue, experimental and conceptual-based work.
Rachel’s own work, Terra Incognita, which is featured as part of the festival at Dalby Forest, highlights our detachment and displacement from the natural world. “It explores the conflicted concepts of land ownership and land access, revealing uncomfortable truths about how physical boundaries and social constructs shape our relationship with, and stewardship of, land,” Rachel shared with us.
This isn’t the only body of her work exhibited; Rachel's small collection A Solitude of Being, which explores the quiet moments of connection with sea, is featured along with the short film that was part of her final major project at Falmouth, Lies A Calm Along The Deep.
“My practice examines human kinship with land, sea and sky,” Rachel told us, when asked about her work. “It explores how connection, estrangement and impermanence shape our relationship with the natural world. It’s grounded in questions of perception, memory and transience as it considers how our individual experiences influence our sense of belonging within wider ecological systems.
“During the MA, my work focused on my personal relationship and connection with the sea. But since graduating, it’s developed to consider questions around wider universal concepts of connectivity with, and estrangement from, our natural environment. I question how we have imposed a sense of separateness that acts as a barrier between us as humans and the rest of the non-human world.
“Terra Incognita, delves into this concept and how the history of enclosures and industrialisation in Britain has deeply impacted our learned cultural response to land, shaping it as a resource to be owned, used or viewed.”
Having stayed in touch with her MA Photography (Online) cohort, and feeling inspired by the work produced, Rachel reached out to a number of her fellow alumni to be involved. Within the curated exhibition space is the work of Dawn Rodgers and Jemma Bannocks: “Dawn’s contribution is a showcase of large scale landscapes from her photographic book, Sorrow exploring the theme of sibling grief,” Rachel shared. “Jemma's new work in progress, Photographers As Ritual Practitioners/Polaroids As Haunted Objects, investigates the notion that artists do not create work in a vacuum, and thus the work is 'haunted'.”
For fellow alumni Mandy Simpson, her cyanotype animated film, Brook House Calling, is featured in the film screening programme, while other Falmouth alumni Kate Carpenter, Geoff Duffield, Tracy Tattersall and Ed Clews all have pieces as part of the Open Call Exhibition.
Speaking of the MA, Rachel shared: “I started the course having trained as a photojournalist working in a documentary tradition. I'd become conscious my work was no longer communicating what I wanted, and I was searching for a more creative means of expression.
“Studying with Falmouth opened a whole new world of experimentation with an inherent sense of having permission to fail. This gave me the chance to trust the process, and my gut instinct, to 'feel' when something was resolved or not hitting the mark artistically. The course was backed up with an intellectual rigour about where my work sits within the photographic canon. I hadn't expected to enjoy that theoretical side as much as I did; it really helped inform how my work developed.
“The work I created on the MA was a real departure from what I'd been producing previously, and it set me on a totally different trajectory. I have since adopted a much more conceptual, research-driven and process-led approach to my practice that allows for a more fluid and multidisciplinary treatment.”
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