Today we’d like to introduce you to Rachael Henson.
Hi Rachael, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I was born in Plano and grew up in the DFW area. For my bachelor’s degree, I was able to attend UT Austin and lived there until I moved to Los Angeles in 2019. After two years in LA, one of which was during the Pandemic, I was laid off and decided to move back to my home state. For the past year and half, I have been a resident artist at the Cedars Union Arts Incubator. This local arts institution advocates for artists by giving them a community, affordable space, and professional practice advice. The residency closes at the end of the month, so I am currently moving out and into a new experimental space called Odyssey Studios.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Getting laid off from my job in California certainly felt like an obstacle. I was working at a film lab and was able to be very close to the materials I used for my artwork. Covid restrictions had tightened over the first year, and the lab had to downsize. It was a blow, but it hasn’t stopped me from continuing my art practice. I currently work at a local museum and am happy to be working in an art-related field.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am a visual artist whose work straddles the line between photography, performance, and sculpture. Recently, my art practice has been an exploration of ephemerality, identity, and the senses as a response to the constant influx of information in the age of mass media. Through a transdisciplinary lens that references cultures from both the East and West, I incorporate my own personal history of my mixed raced heritage into the pieces I make.
A variety of metamorphic materials, such as glass, agar, silicone, scent, flavor, and even biological matter are used to create the pieces. I am known for creating “edible images” where agar (a vegetarian version of gelatin used in culinary/science processes) is imbued with my own personal recipe of flavors that seek to stir complex feelings within the viewer. I invite viewers of my work to consume the image right off the wall in a gallery space. The consumed images that have been prodded and dissected by the patrons are then sealed shut in stained or blown glass vessels. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, new life grows within the works.
By synthesizing these intimate objects and experiences, I connect emotionally to the viewer while also investigating my own place within the world.
I try to experiment with my work as much as I can and try to push the limits of what art can be. A lot of times my pieces are misconstrued as something culinary or of a different category than art.
Who else deserves credit in your story?
I’d like to thank Cedars Union for all of the help they have given me as an artist. They advocated for me, gave me an affordable studio space (which can be quite hard to find in Dallas), and introduced me to the local art community.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @romo_goth
Image Credits
Paolo Panlilio
