I am a deep diver into history; I search for links that connect my personal experience with ecological, ancestral, and colonial histories across time and space. I am on the lookout for form, even fragments. I search for material evidence of my connection to others and wider sense of belonging within the world and within history. I use intuition, research, knowledge, memory, and imagination to identify objects, sources, and things that enable me to elucidate the past in the present with unexpected complexity.
Elegiac in tone, my practice is informed by the environmental legacies of colonialism, and my experience growing up in Hawai`i–my birthplace. My sculptures and installations contain foreboding recreations of cabinets, towers, and caskets. These are based on 18th-century European ‘blueprints’ for the extraction and transport of trees and plants from colonized regions across global trade ports. I alter the original designs and manipulate color, material, and context to reimagine ghostly relics as both ominous and ordinary objects. I infuse my installations with a sense of fecundity and rot by including hundreds of hand-formed botanical elements suggestive of wild overgrowth or piles of decaying fruit.
Through these various interventions I seek to rehumanize history and find meaning beyond connotations of loss. My work emphasizes the cyclical quality of nature by way of material transmutation; I cultivate rifts, gaps, decay, and regeneration with malleable clays, gestural glazes, paints and patinas, or digital composites. Rupture, imperfection, and corruption of form have freed me to transform any material or source, instilling my process with criticality and agency.
My current work contends with memory, ancestry, and collective experience through a new series of work referring to reliquaries, memento mori, and the possibilities of a restored ethics of protection and care. Recent work includes a public art commission that responds to a specific social, spatial, and environmental setting.
rachelledang@gmail.com
Instagram: @rachelledang.studio