Rachel Kneebone’s exhibition Metamorphoses at London’s Wallace Collection places nine delicate porcelain sculptures among the gallery’s rococo masterpieces. The review argues that their precarious, sensual and sometimes unsettling forms feel unexpectedly at home beside works by artists such as Boucher and Fragonard, while encouraging visitors to see those familiar paintings anew.

Kneebone, born in 1973, has worked with porcelain since studying at the Royal College of Art in 2004, using a material traditionally associated with domestic ceramics to explore transformation, instability and desire. Works made between 2017 and 2026 include specially created Temple, as well as Dance and the Pearl series, whose cracks, distorted limbs, bubbles and floral or bodily forms evoke Rodin, classical mythology, Dante and baroque and rococo art.