Rachael Causer, 'Thatch 4'

Rachael Causer is an artist working with sculpture and drawing. 

Her practice explores physical encounters with objects and memory. Working primarily with a direct engagement with materials and processes she negotiates the slippery ground between knowing and not knowing what something is. Causer plays with negative space and the unpredictability of working with fluid materials like plaster, as a means of exploring abstracted forms, familiarity and perception. She constructs one-off casting ‘situations’, often from unconventional materials, pre-lining moulds with fabrics, fibres, dust, tape and other materials to explore intriguing contrasts of surface, imprint and internal structures. Through the additive and reductive processes of constructing and peeling back, filling and sanding, hiding and revealing, she explores a material conversation, creating surfaces that embody their processes of making and give the viewer clues as to the ways in which they were made. 

Her work explores process, time and material remains, focussing on traces relating to touch, repeated activity and labour embodied in everyday objects around us. With a contemporary, archaeological slant her practice questions how objects and spaces can be imbued with history, revealing something of the ways in which they’ve been used, inhabited and retain vestiges of their past. She is fascinated with places of work and daily activity - tabletops, workbenches, desks, sheds. Her interest lies in the evidence from processes - the crumbs, drill holes and cut marks left behind, seeing these spaces as familiar but often overlooked landscapes, charting the ways we impact upon our changing environment and fragile ecologies over time. 

Causer is particularly interested in tiny microclimates such as mosses and lichens, that live in coexistence with other ecosystems in complex and sophisticated ways. She is fascinated by the way they cloak or encrust upon surfaces, inhabiting edges or boundary layers and forming a sense of a covering or a skin. They exist in both fabricated and organic situations, and it is this space of overlap, between the manmade and the natural environment, that intrigues Causer and informs much of her work. 

Rachael Causer (born 1970, Somerset, UK) is a British artist living and working in London.

She works in education at the V&A Museum and in various schools and colleges, the NHS and the community. She has an MA in Fine Art from UAL and was a member of MASS Sculpture mentor programme from 2021-23. She is a member of the Changeable Beast Sculpture Collective. She exhibits widely, including recently at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens in Penzance and in a solo exhibition Thatch, at M2 Gallery in London.