Rebekah Kosonen Bide

Rebekah Kosonen Bide (b. Boorloo/Perth) treats material as a form of partial transmission, making work that corrupts and holds what has passed through it without claiming to preserve it.

Her material research investigates how metal, casting, and sculptural process record the trace of bodies, environments, and the forces that act on a material before, during, and after it has been formed. Her sculptural syntax combines lost-wax casting, electroforming, life-casting, traditional metalsmithing, CAD modelling, and vibrational deformation. Every one of these processes selects, and what fails to carry across is as much her subject as what survives.

That selection is not a neutral one. Inherited techniques arrive with assumptions about what is worth keeping, and the structures that authorise them set the terms on which a thing is permitted to pass: an assay office deciding what counts as real silver, or a schema that admits one kind of record and refuses every other. Across the work she is interested in how bodies and materials register pressure, how inherited techniques carry memory, and how objects, tools, and systems become vessels for what is held, used, and transmitted. Her research draws on new materialist and posthuman thought, feminist technoscience, situated knowledges, and chronopolitics.

Within her methods work, Kosonen Bide develops interfaces, infrastructures, and tools that treat unseen conditions as materials in their own right. These projects investigate how time, attention, capacity, ecology, and social life are structured, carried, and made legible through designed systems. Where the sculptural work treats metal as a material capable of recording the forces that act on it, the methods work extends this inquiry into temporal and organisational forms, making vessels for abstract conditions so they can be looked at, worked with, and inhabited otherwise.

Sculptural works have circulated through NADA Paris, SSENSE, Café Forgot, Basel Social Club, and Gucci Vault. Wearable work has been worn by Lady Gaga, Charli XCX, and Caroline Polachek, and developed in collaboration with Masha Popova and Dilara Fındıkoğlu. Press includes Vanity Fair, Vogue US, Vogue Australia, Vogue Singapore, Vogue Runway, Dazed, AnOther Magazine, The Face, i-D, Perfect, Re-Edition, Cultured, Russh, Document Journal, and 1 Granary.

Born in Boorloo/Perth, on the unceded land of the Wadjuk people of the Noongar Nation, Kosonen Bide studied Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, graduating with First Class Honours, following a Foundation Diploma in Art and Design at Central Saint Martins. She is a registered maker with the London Assay Office. She lives and works between London and Australia.