Banner image: Shrine (2025). Image courtesy of the artist. Description: Photograph of an artwork installed in a gallery, being interacted with by a visitor. The artwork is a corner of hanging, iridescent green and blue fabric - a backdrop for a sculpture standing on a central plinth. The sculpture is an amorphous, abstract shape, decorated all over by glitter ball mirror squares.

Latest collaboration: Rosie was shortlisted for the 2025 Baltic x Shape Arts Emergent programme.

Artist statement: Rosie Aspinall Priest is a queer, neurodivergent artist working across sculpture, sound, ceramics, and socially engaged practice. With a background in facilitation and participatory art, they create spaces for others to make, reflect, and resist through collaborative artistic processes. This commitment to care, co-creation, and justice is central to their evolving practice, which increasingly centres their own sculptural and sonic work.

Rosie holds a PhD in collaborative visual practices with young people and has worked extensively with organisations such as the National Galleries of Scotland, WHALE Arts, and Edinburgh Art Festival. They continue to lead and contribute to projects that honour collective authorship and socially rooted creative practice. Their academic and community experience deeply informs their studio work, where values of slowness, accessibility, and tenderness persist.

Rosie’s work often explores how queerness might shape our understanding of space—not only domestic or architectural space, but emotional, environmental, and even cosmic space. This line of inquiry forms the basis of their ongoing project, the Space Celebration Organisation: a playful, speculative organisation created during their time at Leith School of Art (for which they received the 2025 Contemporary Art Practice Prize). In contrast to extractive, hypermasculine visions of space travel (like those promoted by SpaceX), the Space Celebration Organisation invites joy, reverence, and collectivity. Projects to date include sending messages into space from radical historical sites like Calton Hill during a planetary parade, creating sonic-ceramic altars to meteorites, and writing mythic, queer origin stories for tektites (the glass remnants of meteorite impact).

Rosie’s installations blur the boundaries between object, performance, and participation. Their sculptural environments are often activated through public interaction -whether through collective building (as in Nest, a human-sized structure woven from foraged woodland materials), sound rituals, or speculative storytelling. They are particularly interested in art as a space to reimagine our relationships - with land, with each other, and with futures not yet realised.

Rosie lives and works in Musselburgh, East Lothian, where they are also a carer. They are a 2025 British Ceramics Biennial Award mentee and have an upcoming exhibition at Sett Studios in September 2025. Whether through solitary throwing or collective acts of making, their practice remains grounded in joy, slowness, and solidarity.

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