Rachel Kneebone: Metamorphoses in Porcelain

From 23 September 2026 to 25 April 2027, nine white porcelain sculptures by Rachel Kneebone will enter the galleries of the Wallace Collection in London, establishing connections with the paintings, bronzes and decorative arts in the collection. Metamorphoses: Porcelain Sculpture by Rachel Kneebone also includes two new works, Bower and Temple, created specifically for the exhibition. Born in Oxfordshire in 1973, Kneebone completed an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London in 2004. She works primarily with white porcelain, moulding it into complex organic forms in which anatomical fragments and vegetal elements accumulate and intertwine. Dance, metamorphosis, creation and destruction are recurring themes in her work. Recent projects include Raft of the Medusa, presented at the Foundling Museum in 2017, and 399 Days, a five-metre-high porcelain tower inspired by the plaster cast of Trajan’s Column at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where it was exhibited from 2017 to 2019. The nine sculptures are not grouped in a separate exhibition space but distributed throughout the museum’s historic rooms, particularly known for their holdings of 18th-century French painting and decorative arts, from works by François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard to Sèvres porcelain. Kneebone uses a material associated with the European decorative arts tradition but treats it very differently: crowded surfaces, fragmented bodies and forms that appear to proliferate from one another. A transparent glaze heightens the reflections and variations across their surfaces. The placement of the works establishes specific relationships with individual objects and interiors. Dance, composed of disjointed limbs, is installed in the Billiard Room in relation to the 17th-century Borghese Dancers, sculptures from the After the Dance series are set against the Baroque decoration of the Back State Room and the bronzes in the Great Gallery. Pull, a suspended, tangled structure, hangs from the conservatory ceiling, while Bower was created in response to Fragonard’s celebrated painting The Swing. The title Metamorphoses refers to Ovid’s tales of transformation and to a theme that has long been present in Kneebone’s work. In her sculptures, the body loses its integrity, anatomical and vegetal elements merge, and porcelain - a material traditionally associated with precision and refinement - assumes unstable, profuse forms. Placed among Rococo and Baroque art and decorative objects, the contemporary works establish visual connections with a collection formed in very different periods and contexts.