Rosie McLean (born Oxford UK) is a process led artist who makes sculpture, costume, installations and lens based media from an interest in how we relate to the interior and exterior worlds. She thinks a lot about what it means to be in/visible, un/contained, im/permeable, using a spectrum of methods - automatic drawing and writing, weaving, burning, collecting, melting and so on - to place herself experientially in a push-pull of changing material phenomena.  Aspects of dreams and altered states interweave with patterns and series drawn from her daily experiences to form a sensory and surreal autoethnography.

An interest in the politics of waste leads her to work with discarded and found materials. Repurposed glass beads predominate, evoking the use of prayer beads in devotional practice. It is conceptually important that beads historically occupy and act upon liminal spaces, such as within systems of exchange, belief and adornment; she is interested in conspiring with this quality to think with dis/embodiment and other forms of unseen knowledge.

Underpinning her studio practice is an engagement with healing and ritual, creative pedagogy, psychoanalysis, emancipatory politics and the anticipation of colonial capitalism’s destruction from within.

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.