Rosalind Howdle in her South East London studio, shot by Ocki, Blue Shop Gallery
'Full Shimmer Five', Rosalind Howdle, Oil on canvas, 110 x 90cm, 2023
Blue Shop Gallery presents
’Press Close Magnetic Night’
Rosalind Howdle
14th September - 1st October 2023
PV Drinks Thursday 14th September 6-9pm
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Gallery opening hours:
Wednesday - Sunday | 11am - 6pm
ROSALIND HOWDLE
Rosalind Howdle (b.1997) is a British/American artist based in London. Howdle studied Painting at The Royal College of Art (2022) and Camberwell College of Arts, UAL (2019). She has also studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (U.S.) and Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Canada). She was awarded the Vanguard Prize in 2019. Howdle attended the RCA as a recipient of the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship (2020-22). She was shortlisted for the ‘Now Introducing Prize 2022’ and included in Artlyst’s Ones to Watch 2023.
‘PRESS CLOSE MAGNETIC NIGHT’
Figuration is alive. The constant metamorphoses of painting mimic processes of biology, processes that run as a current through Howdle’s work: evolution, reproduction, self-repair. She paints growth: a germinating seed, a splitting chromosome. Emergent forms exist between the botanical and the animal, the microscopic and the cosmic.
Some painters position their investigations within the metaphysical space: a space that allows paintings to hover somewhere in non-reality, giving them agency to form metaphor and comment retrospectively on our world. Whilst working within this dimension, Howdle has further allowed her paintings to join the universal evolutionary passage as they themselves seem to grow from the picture plane like electric flowers, or float across it like bioluminescence, with colour and form multiplying across the surface like cells, or birthed stars.
Howdle’s investigative placement is a balance of extremes. The works find a voice by presenting the micro within the macro, or vice versa. This process of exploration is present throughout art history. Shakespeare interrogated an entire world through the psychology of a single brain. Howard Hodgkin presented minute emotional situations through marks that seem to encapsulate the entirety of painting. Hilma af Klint encapsulated whole unknown realities within an acute depictions of infinitesimal foliage, or within the necks of swans.
It has become increasingly rare to witness artists explaining this ‘totality through reduction’ when our complete perception of the world has become defined by specific cultural consummations that prevent self definition. It is invigorating to witness Howdle’s contemporary reconfiguration amongst ancient and eternal universal laws.
It is clear that Howdle is tackling the aesthetic similarities between microscopic earthly processes and macroscopic cosmic processes, however where the work really finds its acceleration is in it’s depiction of growth origin: the moment a seed sinks into a soft nourishing material be it soil or the womb’s lining, the splitting of cells during mitosis, the sprouting of a seed after a period of dormancy, a flickering star in the night sky that holds the potential of a new world. It is an attempt to locate the origins of life itself through paint.
‘It’s equal parts exciting and unsettling to witness the determination with which organic matter makes more of itself. It is to witness a self-ongoing orchestration infinitely larger than our individual lives that underpins our existence. This is the unconscious undercurrent of survival and perpetuation that links us to the food we eat and the grass we walk on. The question then becomes a spiritual one, one concerned with love. What happens at the boundary between two entities?’
Howdle is not only presenting visual imagery relating to biology and cosmology but formulating it around our emotional sensibilities. We might not be able to accept the splitting of a cell as part of our daily reality but we can all feel a seed of love planted in our stomachs as it sprouts throughout our veins and becomes total and real. By allowing her work this conceptual dichotomy of growth, between unseen states of fact and deeply felt emotion, the paintings force us to look both inwards and outwards in symmetrical polarity, allowing us, just for a moment, to witness worlds that extend in directions unbeknown.
Whilst it’s easy to get lost in grand meanderings, it’s the small offcuts of Howdle’s daily life that are generative: turning over a rock to find wriggling things underneath, being chased by a bull in a dark field (not my daily life) , visiting a grave, dreaming, menstruating, seeing a wound heal over time, seeing a mother breastfeed her child, a weed growing through a crack in the concrete, the bloom of red light on a construction crane at night, recalling the weather, the shifting seasons, the phase of the moon, the length of days. Sometimes these experiences are translated into imagery, other times the experience itself resurfaces through the process of painting, to have some less identifiable effect, but a presence all the same. Howdle manages to impregnate these minute documentations of life with the energy of a total imagined world.
The paintings are built by affording them the ability to change and shape shift across time. She sketches and erases in thin paint until a structure manifests:
‘It’s like throwing a lot at the wall and seeing what sticks. I find it easier to think through doing rather than pre-visualising, so I don’t work from sketches. For me each painting has its own set of problems to solve, and so the solutions can look quite disparate. I’ve come to see the process of painting as just another form of thinking; the canvas is like an external brain.’
And although Howdle utilises the process of painting as a method of thought, she physically grounds the work through her handling of materials:
‘I want application to mimic subject. I rely on the plastic and fluid capacities of the medium. I push its capacity to traverse states of matter: to be a translucent, flowing liquid, or an opaque paste.’
Howdle is searching for some form of aesthetic truth that lies just beyond our conscious perception. As humans we are ravenous to witness occurrences that lie beyond our daily realities, we dream of abstracted truths. Some look for it in religion, in music, in theatre, in nature. Howdle has found it in painting, and as we consume her work, we learn something more about our internal and external world. As Howdle reconfigures, we become reconfigured. It is Howdle’s illumination of insight that keeps the works active, that forces them alive, that establishes their existence as organism as opposed to object. And it is her determination to give them life that forces them to flutter towards exaltation.
- Exhibition text by Billy Parker, with quotations from Rosalind Howdle.
EXHIBITIONS
2023
Blue Shop Gallery, London (solo)
Tomorrow is Tomorrow is Tomorrow, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery (group)
On The Verge Of Its Own Disappearing, Wilder Gallery (group)
The Mosaic of Blossom, Artistellar Gallery, London (group)
Sweet Spot, Blank Gallery, Shanghai (group)
2022
Good Oblivion, The Function Suite, London (group)
NOW Introducing, Studio West Gallery, London (group)
A Feast for the Eyes, Start Art Fair, Seoul (group)
Anywhere in Between, The Tub Hackney, London (group)
What is Becoming Us, Rupturexibit, London (group)
RCA 2022 Degree Show, London
Summer Fling, L.U.P.O. Gallery, Milan (group)
Too Much Fruit on the Cake, Take Courage Gallery, London (group)