Rachael House is In the Window to celebrate Liverpool Pride July 2026. Rachael is a UK based multi-disciplinary artist who makes events, objects, drawings, performance and zines.
On Rachael House’s “we flourish we blossom” The art of Rachael House resists simplistic conventions of how a fine art practice is categorised by devotion to a singular media. Whilst the iconological, the relations between text and image, maybe understood as mainstays of her work, House’s use of words, images, symbols and gestures slip between yet stick to print, zines and comics, performance, and in recent years via a re-commitment to drawing whilst producing ceramic objects such as badges, tiles, bowls, platters, plates and deities. It would be restrictive to consider House as an artist who works with a termas ambiguous, in its arbitrariness of commitment, as themes. Rather, she is a persistent and critical artist pledged to allegiance, solidarity and unity. Her loyalty to queer, feminist, and trans-inclusive lives is unwavering and aims to disturb their opponents.
Over decades, House has obligated diverse art media to defiantly challenge exclusions and inequities by abjuring indifference and censuring bigotry. Her art insists on but is not limited to juridical equalities. It seeks to co-implicate publics in the dismantlement of the structures, systems, behaviours, and words and images that marginalise, forbid, devalue and invalidate people through increasing then further exploiting their vulnerability. Concurrently, House’s overall project as an artist asks us to desire a restoration to how we live together, one that is to be infused with access to the poetics of joy, rather than the futilities of oppression.
With “we flourish we blossom”, House offers up her latest series of ceramics alongside a new deity, whose role is not to receive offerings, but to protect from enforced compliance. Previously, House had honoured the radical thoughts and actions of multiple predecessors by citing quotes from writers, artists and thinkers whose inclusive versions and visions of the world may lead to other ways of it being thought, enacted and held. The platters made public here contain agential aphorisms written by the artist herself, bringing to the fore her skills as a writer, honed through years of interfacing inked text and image in her renowned contributions to queer and feminist comic cultures.
As scribe, House uses a font that echoes the complexities of the Middle Ages, a time of heresy and revolt, of mass death and famine. Her texts are outlined amidst fecund configurations of symbols that reiterate across House’s oeuvre. We are invited (for isn’t that truly what a platter represents, an invitation to provide and share?) to commune with the wisdom of a feline who grips its teeth; trees of life that branch out to other lives; a norifically-all-seeing creature who wings with futural nourishment; interplanetary gender symbols that unify in alterity but may be uncoiled to support fluidity; and the witching marks of daisywheels that proffer sanctuary. Somewhere between feathered, fish-scaled and armoured House’s familiars are safeguarded by layers of overlapping scallops, meeting in a shared endeavour to shelter and host. House includes one of her genderqueer ceramic deities, which does not make claim to our pandering reverence; rather it’s presence is to parry that which seeks to attack via regulation and assault the ebullience that can determine lives to be lived as shared, rather than ostracised. Rachael House’s “we flourish we blossom” asks us to read ,including between the lines; and to look, including over our shoulders and see our enemies; but to ultimately remember that we can ward against them and be together in collective joy if we enact the potential of solidarities.
By Jason E. Bowman.
Jason E. Bowman is an artist with a curatorial practice. He is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the HDK-Valand Academy – Art and Design at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
