“It's a myth to think that you need to constantly have new ideas. After all, things that interest you enough to question and enquire about are often things that remain central to you.”

 - Rachel Kneebone

Rachel Kneebone’s work addresses and questions the ways we inhabit the body; movement, stasis, renewal, growth, constraint and freedom. Working primarily in porcelain sculpture that embraces the unpredictable nature of its medium, Kneebone focuses on ideas of transformation, metamorphosis and suspension and the material manifestation of our fluid physical and psychical states. Kneebone has said that her work is ‘concerned with inhabiting the body, what it is to be alive in the world’.

A series of Kneebone’s delicately instinctual, mercurial works will feature in the exhibition Self-Made: Reshaping Identities at the much-loved Foundling Museum, a group show reflecting on the complexities of identity and self-determination through the medium of ceramics. Bringing together work by Kneebone alongside Matt J Smith, Renee So and a new commission by Phoebe Collings-James, this exhibition shows how clay is used in different ways to explore embodied narratives, the construction of self and the capacity for physical and emotional transformation. Touching on class, gender, sexuality, cultural heritage and historical legacies, each piece represents an intimate interaction between artist and material, moulded, cast and inscribed with new narratives and forms of expression.

For those unaware, The Foundling Museum is a gem of a museum situated in Bloomsbury, not far from King’s Cross – and it is well worth a visit. The Foundling Museum tells the story of the Foundling Hospital, founded in 1739 as a home for children whose mothers couldn’t keep or care for them. It was the UK’s first children’s charity, now named Coram, and the first public art gallery. It is the only museum to celebrate care-experienced people, and those who care for them. It is the only foundling hospital museum in the world that has an art collection donated by artists.

The Foundling Museum exhibition programme has always been strong in connecting to its history and enduring ethos.The creation of self-identity can be a challenging yet profoundly empowering process; our unique identities are influenced by layers of history, memory and experience. And so, encompassing lost, hidden, re-made or re-claimed identities, Self-Made reveals fresh connections with the enduring stories of identity, care and belonging at the heart of the Foundling Museum.

We were lucky enough to speak with the artist Rachel Kneebone about her artistic practice, as well as get an insight into the Foundling Museum exhibition…

Starting at the beginning, did you grow up in a creative environment?

I think most environments are, given that creation can come out of both the bleakest and the most nurturing environments. The word 'creative' is loaded in a way, it comes with connotations of a rarefied climate, specific criteria needed to produce someone a certain way. I think most things are creative, or have the potential to be creative, depending on the individuals outlook, how we make ourselves. Play and imagination and stories are really valued in my family - literature and make believe. As a family we used to go and visit places and look at things, not only exhibitions.

Are there particular artists who sparked your creatively and helped it form more fully? In a similar vein, do you have memories of your inspiration being sparked?

I used to make lots of things that were shown on Blue Peter, making daffodils out of drinking straws and coloured paper, tissue box holders, all sorts of things. Making things is something I have always done.

In terms of artists, I have looked at artists for specific things, problem solving when I have needed reference for a project. I went to the Picasso Museum on a trip to Paris when I was studying for my A-levels and I remember thinking, “You just have to do it”. This was liberating. The Louise Bourgeois retrospective at the Tate was also a moment of clarity for me, walking through the galleries that were chronologically set out, you could see threads of thought that had remained throughout her practise, the idea that you can return, re-visit and renew. It's a myth to think that you need to constantly have new ideas. After all, things that interest you enough to question and enquire about are often things that remain central to you. But at different times in life, you can return and all the life that has intervened makes the return fresh, it's more about time changing me and a response to those things that remain the same.

What was it about porcelain that makes it the medium for your work? What first drew you to it?

I was first drawn to porcelain due to its whiteness, I had no prior knowledge of the material, in terms of how it would feel to work with or really much knowledge of the tradition of porcelain (that I picked up along the way) Once I started working with it, I realised it has a resistance – it is not passive to touch, and this is what makes the work. The tension between how I am handling the clay and how porcelain as a material responds is key, how its own inherent nature answers back!

Your work operates through themes of the body in motion and metamorphosis. Have you ever been creative within other disciplines such as music or dance?

I enjoy going to watch dance at Sadlers Wells theatre, and I learned the violin and piano when I was at school (not gifted in either). But the Rochdale project was a game changer for me, working with dance and participating in a broader project with several dancers and a choreographer. Rather than my work being an end point it was the catalyst for something new to be made, 'of' my work but not belonging to it. Of course,this is what you hope for as a maker, that your work exists outside of the confines of it as an 'object' but it was thrilling to see something so beautiful emerge as part of a movement of the work. Some of the women who danced are still working together: they have formed a group 'Women in Touch' as a legacy of the exhibition.

You keep your works uncoloured – what is the reason behind this?

The works are white, the colour of the porcelain body, with clear glaze. With the work I am interested in transitions, in-between states, a moment of growth or decay where something is in a state of flux. I feel that colour locates meaning and yet I wanted the work to be ambiguous to capture the processes when something is no longer that but not yet that either. The whiteness creates an almost blankness for each person looking at the work to project their own meaning onto it. The glossy quality of the surface of the work bounces light and creates a surface of interplay between light and shade. For me, that's what sculpture is about.

You work in a huge range of scales – right up to works as large as your monumental piece, 399 Days, which we remember seeing in Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s chapel a few years ago. What are the challenges and opportunities of working to such a scale?

I didn't primarily set out to make a large-scale work: the scale of each piece is dictated by what I am wanting to explore or question. With 399 Days, I was interested in creating a tipping point, to see if I could make a dissolve, nothingness, by making an excess.  In order for the dissolve at the top, to give a sense of the work continuing on beyond its realised form, the piece had to be tall enough to try and make this dissolve, to create this loss of focus. Similarly, there has to be an interior to the exterior, and the modelling needed to go around as well as the movement pulsing up and down the work.

The challenges are more about my inability to visualise something until it is made, in that sense I am working blind. But this is also a positive as it helps the drive to keep going: until it is made I cannot 'see' what I have made. This is the same for all the works I make.

Can you speak specifically about the Through a glassseries – from which some works will be part of the Self-Madeexhibition at the Foundling Museum?

I am interested in the form of cartouches, a device to frame or contain. I wanted to push this, with modelling to overload and adorn this form of containment. In a way to make something structural unstable, to reflect how we can break out of definition and that boundaries are devices to keep us safe, but they rupture, sometimes by life, sometimes by our will to 'break out' of definition or a given way of being. To reinvent and renew ourselves. The flat plane, surrounded by the modelling, is shown to be ruptured and split, so the frame acts more as a portal through which we can begin again. 

There seem to be some serendipitous connections between the forms in your works and the work/activities of the Foundling Museum, including the folds like ribbons, orbsand frameworks…was this something you were aware of coming into the exhibition?

I am familiar with the Foundling Museum, it is a very special place. I think when you make things you are skinless or at lease your skin is porous so that you absorb what is around you and it is redirected into work that only after it's made you can find the narrative within it. I think it is a common experience when looking at things to be finding stuff within it that you have placed there. A bit like what I was saying about the cartouche device, you frame something to stabilise it and offer a protection against not knowing.

To interpret what we see into things that we know, pre-existing things is, I think, part of how we process the world. I am familiar with being told my work looks like things that often I have not seen.

But yes, there are many overlaps between forms in the Foundling Museum and Through a glass, as you mention the orbs and ribbons. There are also associations with the plaster work in the great court room. And the ornate picture frames. There's a shared vocabulary of forms.

Your work broadly explores the human condition. Would you say this is the artist’s vital role? If not, what is?

I think an artist's role is to make their work as best they can – that's it. Anything outside of that is not under the control of an artist.

Self-Made presents your work alongside the work of Phoebe Collings-James, Matt Smith and Renee So. Is there anything you might like to say about the other artists, and how you hope a visitor might respond?

All of us work with clay, we have shared material, different clay bodies are used, but there is the metamorphosis of clay from initial wet malleable stuff, that we work with to its vitrified fired form. Clay is such a versatile material, it's a lump of 'mud' that is full of inherent possibilities depending on its handling and the person/artist working with it. I'm thrilled to be exhibiting alongside these artists, all of whom show the richness of these possibilities in different ways! Which fits so perfectly with the exhibition title of Self-Made. I hope any visitor will enjoy finding connections and links between the work, between the Foundling Museum and within themselves. What makes us who we are, how we make ourselves who we are.

The [Quick] #FLODown:

Any other upcoming projects of note that you can discuss?

I have some works in 'Women & Freud: patients, pioneers, artists' exhibition at the Freud museum 31st October – 5th May 2025 which I am really excited about!

What have been the most rewarding moments of your career thus far?

It's all rewarding.

What’s the best advice you have ever received?

Righty tighty, lefty loosey.

 Who are you outside of the ‘office’?

The same as I am within it, but marginally less clay on my clothes.

 What do you love about London?

That even doing nothing you are part of something.

Rachel Kneebone is exhibiting as part of Self-Made: Reshaping Identities at The Foundling Museum, 15 November 2024 – 1 June 2025. For more information visit foundlingmuseum.org.uk.