Rachael Colley - Precious Collective
Rachael Colley
Designer biography:
Rachael is an artist and doctorial researcher at Loughborough University in the UK. Her research challenges our collective connections around food consumption through an exploration of the body and jewellery, with the aim of communicating aspects of her lived experience with SSc. Her award-winning work is held in significant national and international collections at Sheffield Museums’ Trust, Walsall Leather Museum, Musee Internationale de la Parfumerie in France, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art in China, Itami City Museum of Art, History and Culture in Japan, Archivo Negroni and Le Arti Orafe in Italy.
Collection concept:
Using materiality and humour, the ‘MelonColley’ series presents discarded melon peel as jewellery, highlighting the melancholy experiences of chronic health condition sufferers. Our bodily preciousness and precarity is exposed in the crafting of fragile, reactive and unstable food waste, by applying denaturing techniques to fruit peels which reference the atrophy of internal skins caused by the autoimmune disease systemic sclerosis (SSc).
