MFA Sculpture, Room 130F
Rachael Henson
“Trace",” 5” x 7” x 7” , helping hands, platinum silicone, fingerprint
In a time of intense polarization, with little room for nuance or understanding, there is a need for a different kind of connection. Rachael Henson’s practice pushes up against hierarchical modes of thinking conceived during the Enlightenment, whose remnants still linger within bodies, interactions, and technologies. Through materials such as silicone, glass, and collaborations with robots and bacteria, she explores porous boundaries between human and nonhuman, immaterial and corporeal, autonomy and submission, inside and outside, disgust and comfort, synthetic and biological.
Her work reflects an ongoing negotiation with control. How it is exercised, resisted, and shared across entangled networks of humans, machines, and matter. By creating artworks that span the disciplines of art, technology, and science, Henson observes and unsettles the binaries that structure perception and behavior. Her interest in the uncanny and the abject is not rooted in gore, but in the unease of living within a body that is never contained: leaking, merging, and entangled within a constantly evolving world.
Rachael Henson
Rachael Henson is an artist based in Philadelphia, currently pursuing a graduate degree in Sculpture at Temple University. Her practice employs the use of silicone, glass, electronics, sensory based installations, and living materials to challenge the dualities that shape our world. Through her practice, Henson explores and critiques the subtle systems of control embedded within everyday life, questioning how belief and power are inscribed in both the organic and synthetic. Her work invites viewers to reconsider rigid binaries and explore a more interconnected reality, blurring the lines between the seen and unseen, the human and non-human.