Artist
Rachael House
Artist
Artist Bio
(b. Maidstone, UK) is a UK-based, multi-media fine artist who makes participatory events, objects, performance, drawings, and zines. Concerns in her work include claiming public space, collective joy, ageing, mental health, queer family, feminism, and gender. In 2021, she published her first book, Resistance Sustenance Protection, funded by Arts Council England and Metal.
In 2023, a tiled panel was acquired for V&A permanent collection, and her sketchbooks of drawings made over the first year of C-19 are now part of the Wellcome Collection. Recent work has shown at Whitechapel Gallery, Parlour Gallery Deptford, Queer Britain, Arnolfini Bristol, De La Warr Pavilion, and New Hall Art Collection. In 2023, she was in residence at The Feminist Library, leading to an exhibition of research and work in progress. Recent publications include Crafted With Pride, edited by Daniel Fountain (Intellect, 2023), Menopause A Comics Treatment (Penn State University Press, 2020), In Other Words (Metal/LADA, 2020), and The Art Of Feminism (Tate, 2019).
Artwork Description
In One Is Not Born, But Rather Becomes A Woman, Rachael House presents the words of existentialist philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir in the form of a ceramic tile frieze, utilising a medium that has traditionally been associated with female artists, and integrating into it symbols associated with women’s and trans activism.
The work questions what A Real Woman is, while not giving a definite answer. De Beauvoir’s quote is taken from her book, The Second Sex, in which she proposes that social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature. These words, in the context of the nature versus nurture argument, are arguably even more resonant today, as culture wars rage about gender and identity, and even richer in meaning, as we consider the many ways one can ‘become’ a woman.
