Rachel Fleminger Hudson (b. 1997) is a photographer and filmmaker, who employs a multi-disciplinary approach to her practice spanning art direction, set design and costume.

After graduating in 2022 from Central Saint Martins, she won the international Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents 2022, exhibiting at the Luma Arles Foundation. In 2023, she held her first solo exhibition at MEP in Paris.

Her editorial work includes cover stories for Dazed Magazine, Luncheon, and Cultured Magazine. Commercial clients include Miu Miu and Paul and Joe. 

She is currently an artist in resident at the Sarabande Foundation and was included on the Dazed 100 list 2023.

︎︎︎Press

“Drawing from both visual, material and academic research, I synthesise the mediums of costume, still and moving image to study people and places. I aim to engage with our psychological entanglement with our garments.

Costume is an often overlooked symbolic language, which to me is as significant and revealing as dialogue or cinematography. I aim to create work where the research process drive and define the characters and their spaces.

I draw on both fiction and non-fiction sources in my research process, looking at 1970s filmmakers such as Ken Russell and John Cassavetes, as well as contemporary documentary and street photography.

I am strongly influenced by Cultural Studies, and in particular the Postmodern theories of Frederick Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Heike Jenß who engages with fashion memory and the “cross temporal explorations” of vintage clothing. In my work I explore the deconstruction and codification of identity and society found in academic theory, through its manifestation in the materiality of garments.

Via an extensive research process, I explore identities through costumes, which are then staged and captured through photography and film. My work is often fiction, but within it, realities exist in the clothes, tracing histories and engaging with past through the intimacy of skin to skin contact with historical garments. Consequently, the identities explored are both fact and fiction, as they amalgamate the actor, the character and the identities latent within the garment.

These identities are engaged with through their materiality and the relationship formed between the wearer and the clothes. I read the garment as an spectral invocation of the inner, a projection of the suspension point between the real and the fantasy self. Through the process of wearing we renegotiate and co-author these narratives. Simultaneously, we are shaped by and reflected in material forms. Our spatial experiences of the material and the immaterial, the physical and the psychological, the body and fabric are blurred. On both a cellular and metaphysical level we become our clothes.

Hence, I aim to understand others through these materialities, to explore identities in relation to garments and understand fantasy and reality as one and the same.

In particular, I am interested in 1970s, and the societal tensions and contradictions of the Modern/Postmodern cusp which are physicalised in the fashion. Within this, I explore Subcultural Identity, performativity, “high” and “low” culture, feminism, masculinities and consumer culture. However, I am aware to not glorify or sanitise the past, and aim to reconfigure it in the context of the present.”