Born and raised in New York City, Rachel Bacon moved to the Netherlands after graduating from Pratt Institute in 1990 with a degree in Fine Arts. Bacon has received grants from the Dutch Visual Arts Fund, and completed a number of public art commissions in the Netherlands and in 2008 in New York City for the Trust for Public Land. Recently she was a finalist for a Percent for Art commission in NYC. Recent exhibitions include SeaWorthy, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NYC; One on One, Brno House of Arts, Brno, Czech Republic; Float, Scheltema Actuele Kunst, Leiden, NL; Common Ground, Lönnström Museum of Art, Rauma, Finland; and Floating World, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NYC. Bacon has often worked as an artist-in-residence, most recently in 2010, participating in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's residency on Governors Island. Bacon moved to the Hague, the Netherlands in 2002, and teaches there regularly at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

My work begins with an awareness of the transience and vulnerability of the material world. I focus on issues of cultural and psychological displacement such as migration, loss, shifts in identity and the fleeting and fragile nature of the material world. My work is often the result of a process in which specific environments and a dialogue with the users or inhabitants is taken as a point of departure. I create models that link particular elements from the world-at-large to a more critical socially engaged perspective. These works mainly take the form of sculptural installations made of paper, and can include drawing and film as well. Most recently, I have been making work based on the intersection of urban and natural landscapes.