Rachael Louise Bailey (b. 1975) lives and works in Kent, UK. Bailey studied at Statuaria Arte School of Sculpture, Cararra, Italy (2004); Conception de jardin dans le paysage, Formation Professionnel - Ecole Nationale Suprieure du Paysage, Versailles, France (2006-08); and Direct Carving Stone and Wood, Formation Professionnel-Beaux Arts de la Ville de Paris, France (2010-14). Bailey has exhibited extensively across the UK, France, Japan, and Portugal. In 2019 Bailey won the Fondation Francois Schneider, Contemporary Talents International Art Award as well as the An Lanntair Island Going Residency in the Outer Hebrides. In 2022 Bailey participated in XXII Bienal Internacional de Arte de Cerveira in Portugal. Bailey’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Fondation Francois Schneider, France.

Pushing the boundary of art’s engagement with ecology, Bailey’s sculptural practice is a form of sustained artistic whistleblowing. Embedded in reuse and reclamation, Bailey creates environmentally charged works which shine an unsparing spotlight on the anthropocentric realities of our time. The genesis for Bailey’s work is the harvest, investigation, and transformation of man-made and organic materials which have been discarded and deemed of little value or significance yet have far reaching environmental impact. Bailey will often study and work with a material for several years, meticulously researching its impact and experimenting with its physical properties, a practice which stands in counterpoint to contemporary habits of mass production and consumerism.

Bailey’s form of creative climate action is embedded in the social, political, economic and environmental spheres she seeks to address and expose. Bailey’s recent work intermingles ‘the black stuff’, a plastic marine pollutant used in industrial oyster farming, and salvaged sheep’s wool, which farmers are being forced to burn due to a drop in value in the face of a diminishing wool trade. In the summer of 2021 ‘the black stuff’ series became the single largest body of physical evidence used in a public enquiry to demonstrate the environmental hazards caused by the controversial expansion of oyster trestles. Bailey’s material-as-specimen transfigurations are informed by her extensive research into their historical, physical, and contextual properties in tandem with her emotional unknotting of the anthropocentric implications their continuous spawning. Through her singular and assiduous alignment of material and message, Bailey stands in opposition to contemporary greenwashing.