Our 2023 Creative in Residence, Raquel Caballero, will be delving into the UTS Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections, in order to create a Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Curiosities) containing 10 awe-inspiring sculptural objects that will engage our communities’ visual senses and refute the popular notion that you can ‘Google everything’. Raquel seeks out the weird, the obscure, the outrageous, the transgressive, and the always-humorous reference materials that bring forth new ideas and techniques and finds that it’s the printed book that never fails to deliver the goods.
Raquel’s practice is rooted in her fascination with the excesses found in popular and folk cultures. She is also inspired by maximalist and amateur aesthetics. Working primarily with papier-mâché, textiles, and recycled materials, she makes objects of reverence that celebrate human-made fantasies and follies with 'traditional crafts'. Through her research and art practice, Raquel endeavours to create a Wunderkammer that will highlight the Library’s archival materials as a treasure trove of ideas speaking not just to the academic, but to the creative individual.
Raquel Caballero is an artist with a thriving studio practice at Our Neon Foe, an Inner West artist-run gallery and studio space. By day Raquel is a Librarian at the Australian, Film, Television & Radio School Library (AFTRS) where she creates mammoth sets from concept to creation to install. Not to mention Raquel also runs a rare books business with her best friend and fellow artist, Emily Hunt, trading in hard-to-find books on the arts, counterculture, and the occult.
During the residency Raquel will invite students to engage with her creative process, ask them to consider what makes them curious, and help them create their own collage art piece, using UTS Library’s Special Collections.
The artist will be on-site at UTS Library, level 7, (most) Fridays from the 3rd of March – the 28th of July 10 am-4 pm.
