Rosie McLean is a process-led artist based in London who works with sculpture, costume and assemblage to create installations and lens based media. At the moment she is thinking about the cultural politics of emotion (Ahmed) via soft power, saturnalia and ritual. 

Sometimes she makes things that take on the role of companions, co-conspirators and support structures (Condorelli, Wade), and sometimes as explorations of the relationship between material and immaterial: the moment where the mask slips off reality-as-we-think-we-know-it and the potential within this for transformation. 

An interest in the politics of waste leads her to work predominantly with found and discarded materials. Her creative and destructive methods include burning, embroidering, smashing, melting, weaving, carving etc. She invites dynamics between revelation - obfuscation and control - release to emerge from surreal conversations between objects, bodies, glass and other translucencies. Often she uses repurposed glass beads to distort and reimagine their associated logics eg. feminised reproductive labour, spiritual practice, currency and seductive optics.

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), 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.