Rackham studied sculpture and performance at the
College of Fine Arts in Sydney, graduating in 1989 with the Sculpture and Alumni prizes. It was here she was first involved in
Australian artist-run initiatives, initially as Co-Director in 1987 (with Adrienne Doig) of ArtHaus laneway gallery in
Darlinghurst, New South Wales, then as a member of Ultimo Project Studio Collective in
Ultimo and
Glebe in
Sydney. In 1995, while completing a Master of Arts in Women's Studies at the
University of Wollongong, Rackham became one of the earliest Australian curators of
internet art. In collaboration with Louise Manner, Ali Smith and Sandy O’Sullivan, Rackham produced the 1995 exhibition
WWWO: Wollongong Worlds Women Online – an Australian online women's group exhibition, featuring the first or early digital works from 30 Australian women including Francis Dyson and
Mez Breeze. In 2000, Rackham's
carrier won The Mayne Award for Multimedia, part of the
Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. In an interview with
Eugene Thacker in CTheory, Rackham speaks of dealing with the body at a molecular level "infectious agents... steaming open protoplasmic envelopes, penetrating cellular cores, crossing species boundaries, and shattering illusions of the discrete autonomy of ourselves" In a paper analysing
carrier for the academic journal
Biography, scholar Tully Barnett connects the
carrier to
posthumanist theories, and describes it as "a biopolitical web-based work that sets out to destabilize users' traditional or conventional notions of the body." The work is "a text- and image-based multimedia work that invites the reader to navigate through a narrative of infection and illness." Rackham's artworks were widely exhibited during the first wave of internet art (1995–2003) being included in seminal exhibitions like
Art Entertainment Network,
Beyond Interface,
ISEA, European Media Art Festival,
transmediale, Perspecta99, Biennale de Montreal 2000, and Biennial of Buenos Aires 2002. She is founder and producer the online media arts forum, –empyre–, from 2002 as part of her doctoral thesis on Art and Identity in Virtual Reality Environments. -empyre- featured in events at
NTT InterCommunication Center Tokyo, and
documenta in the
Documenta 12 magazines project (2006). Building
Empyrean – one of Australia's first multi-user virtual reality environments, Rackham explored the conception of electronically mediated environments as "soft skinned space", and encouraged users' to explore their relationship with their avatars. Two of Rackham's internet artworks are included in N. Katherine Hayle's
Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary – a book designed to help electronic literature move into the classroom along with the CD "The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1". == Work ==