Rachel Wells
Dr Rachel Wells is a Senior Ruskin Tutor in the History and Theory of Fine Art
Rachel writes on modern and contemporary art. Her research considers the ways in which artists’ use of scale, distance and focus reflects and reveals aspects of their socio-historical context. Particular areas of interest include memorialisation, digital technology and the assignment of value.
Rachel has published widely on the relation of sculpture to photography, and object to image, in the context of contemporary digital culture and its theorisation. Recent book chapters have focused on the work of Hank Willis Thomas - Monumental Images: The Use of Scale and Photography in Recent Commemorative Sculpture (De Gruyter, 2025) and Lubaina Himid - The Scale at Which Loss Is Visible: Life-Size Hauntings in Contemporary Art (Ledi, 2022), while previous studies have considered this nexus in the work of Elizabeth Wright (Fundacion Juan March, 2023), Steve McQueen (Tate, 2017), Samuel Beckett (Ibidem, 2017), Henry Moore (Tate, 2015), Thomas Ruff (Leuven University Press, 2013), Wolfgang Weileder (Kerber Verlag, 2013) and Fischli and Weiss (Wiley Blackwell, 2013). Rachel’s book Scale in Contemporary Sculpture: Enlargement, Miniaturisation and the Life-size (Ashgate, 2013, Routledge paperback 2016) was the first text to offer a theorised account of scale in contemporary sculpture and its photographic documentation within the interlinked contexts of accelerated global capitalism and the legacies of postmodern theory. Recently this book was cited as part of the inspiration for the 2023 exhibition Scale: Sculpture 1945-2000 in Madrid. Rachel has written for exhibition catalogues and art journals including Art History, Sculpture Journal and Oxford Art Journal.
Rachel has been an invited speaker at the Universities of Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Milan (keynote), Newcastle, Oxford, Sunderland, Courtauld Institute of Art, London and Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich. She has given invited talks and tours at galleries and museums including the Ashmolean, Baltic, the Hayward Gallery, the Henry Moore Foundation, the Laing Art Gallery, Modern Art Oxford, the Photographers’ Gallery and Tate Britain.
As a fellow of the Higher Education Academy Rachel has been an External Examiner at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester. She was Lecturer in the History and Theory of Art at Newcastle University (2011-2018), Tutor in Fine Art (History and Theory) at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (2009-2011), and Henry Moore Foundation Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art (2008-9). She received her PhD (2008) and MA (2004) from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London University. Prior to her study in the History of Art, Rachel read English at Cambridge University (BA 2003).
At the Ruskin Rachel teaches across all three years of the undergraduate programme. In 2025-26 Rachel is teaching the BFA1 courses ‘Contemporary Art History and Theory: An Introduction’ and ‘Contemporary Art and the Monument’, and the BFA2 course ‘Art and Sense: Counterintuition as Methodology’. She is a tutor for BFA3 Extended Essay students and has acted as an internal examiner on the DPhil programme. She contributes to the department through BFA admissions and examining. Rachel is the Fine Art tutor at Worcester College.
