irene bow

Statement

Central to the thinking behind recent work is the question of the compatibility of our culture with the natural world and its limits. I think of my practice as research, a way of recording and reporting from my own subjective experience of the world and as a way of questioning and re-imagining aspects of our ecological identity.

The works are constructed single pieces, installations and groups varying in size but often of human scale. The various material qualites, using manmade or processed natural materials and the method of construction, are central to their nature. They are usually open works, skins and open interiors that leave space for imagination.

I often try to set up a tension between material elements and form, intelligibility and elegance and strive for a dynamic quality. I like to make use of forms that may suggest metaphorical readings. All the works are provisional in nature and aspire to stir the curiosity of an observer.

Titles do not determine meaning but suggest a context, floating words across the gap between language and object.

Issues within the environmental debate, questions of perception arising from the mediated nature of our contact with the natural world that challenge old paradigms and factors such as consumerism and deforestation, inform the works.

Influences are diverse and changing, including artists, Richard Deacon, Agnes Denes, Martin Puryear, writers Italo Calvino, Thomas Hardy, phenomenologists Maurice Merleau- Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Paul Crowther, and anthropologists David Abrams and Mary Douglas.