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. 

I am a materially curious person who is deeply fascinated by new techniques, and I have a playful experimental approach to art making. I work in clay, plaster, found objects, photography, and drawing. My work is primarily sculptural, but it does interchange between two and three dimensions. In childhood, I was raised in a highly structured belief system. This came abruptly to an end at the age of 36, where I 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, is a fundamental influence in my work.

Using lived experience and subjective reflections, I examine belief systems and how they can fundamentally change over time. My drawings consist of simple, representative symbols from my past beliefs. My art making involves the use of handmade and found materials that are composed into sculptural archetypes. Once made, they are held in storage, alongside journals, drawings, and photographs to be later unpacked, assembled, analysed, dismantled and re-packed again.

This way of working is a 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. Through this reflective approach I also examine the extended themes of authority, attachment, and frames of reference.