Bio
Born and raised in South Florida, Rachel Warren currently lives and works in Atlanta, GA. Warren primarily works in photography, installation, and performance, seeking new ways to combine the mediums. Warren’s work revolves around mourning, death rituals, memory, and grief through a lens-based practice. Using the analog process to look at the physical archive of film and her own family history, she asks the question, “What does it mean to contemplate our own mortality?”
She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in photography at the University of Central Florida in 2017. She is currently pursuing her Masters of Fine Arts at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University.
Artist Statement
"Preemptive Mourning" uses temporal, analog photographic practices to confront viewers with questions surrounding cultural funerary practices and the discomforts of death. The photograph, as a memory object, is simultaneously a reminder of the lived experience and a representation of what is no longer. I use the cemetery as my subject, a physical landscape that acts as an archive itself. The space exists, long after the material body decomposes, serving as a placeholder for a thing no longer there. Performance at the cemetery site is the crux, each subsequent work building upon each other to invite contemplation on the transformative power of decay, the interconnectedness of all living things, and the enduring legacy that permeates the very soil beneath our feet. Through returning to these in-between spaces of life and death, I grapple with my own mortality in an anticipatory catharsis.