Using materiality and humour, Rachael Colley explores themes around preciousness and value, creating objects which are explored in experimental dining events, exhibitions, installations, and visual art projects. Her ‘MelonColley’ series, designing jewellery using discarded melon peel, highlights the melancholy experiences of chronic health sufferers. The body’s precarity is exposed in the crafting of fragile, reactive, and unstable food waste, by applying denaturing techniques to fruit peels which reference the atrophy of internal skins caused by the autoimmune disease systemic sclerosis (SSc).

Colley is an artist, Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University and doctoral researcher at Loughborough University in the UK. Her research challenges our collective connections around food consumption through an exploration of the body and objects, with the aim of communicating aspects of her lived experience with SSc.