British artist Rachel Kneebone is known for her intricate porcelain sculptures that explore transformation, vulnerability, and the threshold between the human and the mythological. Kneebone has stated that her work is ”‘concerned with inhabiting the body, what it is to be alive in the world”.

Salmacis (2016) takes its name from the myth of Hermaphroditus and the nymph Salmacis, who, in a moment of obsessive desire, fuses with the youth into a singular androgynous being. In this work, cascading forms, limbs, tendrils, and floral motifs, spill and knot together in a vortex of porcelain. Kneebone mentions how; “'stories are very important for my work. The creation of other worlds, other times, other spaces and other ways of being”. The sculpture resists clear resolution; instead, it invites the viewer to contemplate transformation as an ongoing, unsettling, and profoundly human process.

Salmacis resonates as a meditation on hybridity, liminality, and rebirth. Like works by Lucio Fontana or Allison Janae Hamilton, it asks where the body ends and where myth, or matter begins.

Her sculptures are held in major institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, affirming her place in contemporary sculpture. Represented by White Cube, she has been exhibited internationally.

Provenance
The artist

Exhibitions
(Group) ‘Remembering Tomorrow: Artworks and Archives’, White Cube Hong Kong, 18 July – 25 August 2018
(Solo) Rachel Kneebone: ‘Ovid in Exile’, White Cube Hong Kong, 26 May – 30 August 2017