My Art Practice
My name is Penny Rowe - I’m an Artist - I’m also the Director of Penny’s Community Arts (CIC) and since 2014 I’ve been sharing art in schools and around my community. Since the late 1990’s I’ve been rearing my six children whilst continuing my academic studies; as a carer I’ve developed patience and compassion which has supported my desire to share artistic understanding and create opportunities for others to make their own artwork.
My work is primarily sculptural, but it does interchange between two and three dimensions. My practice is fundamentally informed by subjective contemplation and through these idiosyncratic reflections, I make material forms that represent the shifts in my understanding of lived experience.
My process is driven by materiality. I use both handmade and found materials in the studio, and through experimentation, I compose new sculptural archetypes which have poignant meaning. Once the new objects are made, they are archived and held in storage, alongside journals, drawings, and photographs to be later unpacked, assembled, analysed, dismantled and re-packed again. This process is a physical representation of how I experience memory.
In childhood, I was raised in a highly structured belief system. This came abruptly to an end at the age of 36, where I rejected my religious upbringing and re-examined many of the foundational tenets, I had previously accepted. The experience of religious conversion, then a crisis of faith, followed by rebuilding new belief systems, fundamentally influenced the content of my artistic expression. Thus, my practice is a type of psychological system of processing trauma, a pensive connection of emotion, memory, and artistic production. Sometimes the work changes, and these changes are also documented in the archive. Because of this repetitive grounding, my work is seated within cathartic practices as I use materials as a way of processing feelings in relation to lived experience.
Because my practice is a way of understanding consciousness, I extend this inquiry into research about psychology, specifically cognitive and behavioural, which focusses on how the mind works through perception, memory and learnt behaviours through religious, cultural, and societal conditioning. This research forces me to consider my practice outside subjective territories and position it within public facing confrontation.
