Rachael Plassard is a third-generation jeweller. Growing up making alongside her mother and grandmother, she developed an early appreciation for craft and storytelling through objects. She refined her skills undertaking courses at West Dean and Morley College before working in Hatton Garden, where roles with a bullion dealer and a fine jeweller gave her invaluable insight to the jewellery industry. In 2022, she completed an MA in Jewellery at the University for the Creative Arts, a formative experience that helped define her artistic practice. Since graduating, her work has featured in exhibitions including Reimagining Nature at the Mayfair Gallery during London Craft Week, Rising Stars at the New Ashgate Gallery and Spotlighting at the Goldsmiths' Centre. She has received the Find a Maker Award, the Byre Gallery Showcase Award and a Goldsmiths’ Craft & Design Council Award. Today, she is based at her seaside studio at the Hotwalls in Old Portsmouth, where she creates contemporary jewellery collections and bespoke commissions.

Rachael’s collection A Place to Remember explores personal narratives and the nature of memory - its fragility, imperfections, and the ways it changes over time. Through ideas of beauty and loss, and shaped by the experience of losing someone close to her, the work considers what we choose to hold onto and how objects can be small shrines, preserving the memory of something or someone lost. Ornament and decoration are used as a visual language for stories that are difficult to express in words. In particular, Rachael is fascinated by the acanthus leaf and the way this historical motif has been reinterpreted in architecture and the decorative arts. For her, ornament becomes a way of holding onto something fragile, gently disguising imperfections whilst giving value and significance to what might otherwise be overlooked or forgotten. By extracting these motifs from everyday objects, she creates small, portable pieces of art.