Image: The Wallace Collection, London
With the Wallace Collection’s decorative interiors as her backdrop, Rachel Kneebone places nine white porcelain sculptures throughout the galleries. Two of the sculptures, ‘Bower’ and ‘Temple’, were created especially for the display and are shown there for the first time.
The display reveals unexpected kinship between Kneebone’s contemporary sculptures and the Collection’s historic treasures. The works are described as surreal, tangled white forms finished with a clear gloss glaze. This finish accompanies forms that invite viewers to tease out connections between Kneebone’s white sculptures and the museum’s masterpieces.
Drawing on themes of movement, transformation and mythology, the sculptures are positioned among the gilt, silk, Sèvres porcelain, and Boucher and Fragonard rococo paintings of the historic galleries. The placement brings Kneebone’s work into the same gallery setting as these elements of the Collection. The display therefore presents the sculptures within rooms containing decorative materials, porcelain and rococo paintings identified in its description.
Kneebone describes the Wallace Collection as ‘a rich resource’ and ‘a place of pleasure, delight and instruction’. She says that the works she is placing are responses to the Collection, intended to forge connections and contrasts within its spaces.
