Artist Profile Rhianna Hanworth

Hanworth’s striking wearable hybrid radically collapses flesh and apparatus to confront technological acceleration.

Artist Statement

Rhianna Hanworth’s sculptural practice explores what it means to have, or to be, a body. Working with hybrid and fragmented forms that disrupt function and familiarity, she invites viewers to reflect on their own embodiment. Hanworth considers the body inseparable from lived experience: at once material, social, and in constant transformation.

Her work draws on metaphors of the prosthetic and the cyborg but resists techno-utopian fantasies of perfectibility. Instead, she is drawn to limitations and the ways they anchor us to our physical selves. Using prosthetic-like forms, Hanworth questions how tools shape identity and desire. Fascinated by the space between body and object, her sculptures function as bridges between the two, inviting both maker and viewer to experience a subtle displacement of self.

Planned Obsolescence was conceived as a tool for reclaiming the body, emerging from the artist’s anxieties and feelings of helplessness amid rapid technological development. By restricting rather than enhancing function, the work critiques techno-capitalist fantasies of limitless progress and control.

The piece takes the form of a wearable sculpture: a pair of steel wings attached to a leather corset via a back-brace-like harness. Heavy and sharp, the wings constrain the wearer’s movement but grant them the agency to choose those limits.

Across her practice, Hanworth approaches sculpture as an extension of herself, prompting shifts in how we see, use, and ultimately reclaim our bodies through tools and objects. Through processes of deconstruction and reimagining, she works to collapse binaries between human and nonhuman, subject and object, body and thing. Using shifts in scale, material, and function, she unsettles expectation to cultivate more empathetic and collective understandings of embodiment.

Ultimately, her sculptures aim to provoke a visceral response: a mediated recognition of our own limits and possibilities. By destabilising objects and their meanings, Hanworth invites viewers into a more fluid and imaginative relationship with the self.

Artist Biography

Rhianna Hanworth (b. 2000, Jamaica) is a London-based multimedia artist whose practice explores the body as a site of transformation, control and empathy. Working across sculpture, installation and digital media, she engages with the concept of the ‘prosthetic’, not only as an extension of the body, but as a metaphor for intimacy, dependence, control, and adaptation within techno-capitalist systems.

Her materially rich works often combine natural and ephemeral substances such as beeswax, fruit, and leather with industrial elements like metal, creating sensorial hybrids that oscillate between attraction and abjection. Drawing from feminist theory, kink/BDSM symbolism, and notions of body modification, Hanworth’s work reimagines the boundaries between organic and synthetic, human and machine, flesh and object.

Hanworth holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London. Her recent projects have investigated embodiment, nostalgia and the feminine through performative and speculative approaches to making.