Rosie McLean is a process-led artist based in London working across sculpture, costume and assemblage to create installations and lens-based media. Her current research explores the cultural politics of emotion (Ahmed) through soft power, saturnalia and ritual.

An interest in the politics of waste draws her to work with found materials, which she burns, embroiders, smashes, melts, weaves and carves, putting the discarded into circulation through alchemical processes and intuitive negotiations of choice and chance.

 Through surreal conversations between objects (bodies), glass and other translucencies, she stages dynamics between revelation and obfuscation, control and release. Glass beads recur throughout her work, repurposed to distort and reimagine the logics they typically convey - spiritual practice, currency, seductive optics and feminised reproductive labour.

She welcomes collaboration and has worked across disciplines including photography, sound, performance, film and permaculture.

She welcomes collaboration and has worked with practitioners across disciplines such as photography, sound, performance, film and permaculture.

Past work has been supported by institutions including Scottish Sculpture Workshop (Aberdeen), Kunstraum Kreuzberg (Berlin), Bundeskunsthalle (Bonn), The Royal Academy (London), Red Gallery (London), Glastonbury Festival (Somerset), Modern Art Oxford, Ovada (Oxford), Fusion Arts Oxford (Oxford), Arts Council England and A-N. 

She began the MFA in Sculpture at the Slade in October 2025.