Siân Bowen studied Fine Art at University of Newcastle and Edinburgh College of Art and spent four years in Japan having been awarded a Monbusho Scholarship to Kyoto University of Arts. She has developed drawing-centred projects in a diverse range of environments including transient architectural spaces, archives, archaeological sites, herbaria and museums. These have taken place in China, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Taiwan and Russia - as well as in the UK. Recently her focus has also been on the production of video works and artist’s books.
Ongoing interests are in the boundaries between damage and the creative impulse, and in light and the drawn surface. Other key interests include the potential that drawing has to interrogate materiality and states of flux and the multi-sensory nature of museum heritage. She has become increasingly interested in how her works might engage with concerns regarding the vulnerability and sustainability of plant life and of the natural world.
As Resident Artist in Drawing at the V&A, London, 2006-8, she developed a body of site-specific works on paper relating drawing to the museum context, exhibition display and the V&A’s Asian and Word & Image Collections. From 2010-12, she worked with the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, as Guest Artist in Drawing to examine the relationship between materiality and the ephemeral; prints from the Nova Zembla collection, conserved after having been discovered frozen in the Arctic for three hundred years, provided the framework for a new body of works that formed a solo exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in 2012. The project included a series of video works filmed whilst travelling through the Russian Arctic.
Between 2013-18, as a Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle, she developed Paper Studio Northumbria - a studio and archive relating to the material and conceptual aspects of paper. Later, as Professor of Drawing at Arts University Bournemouth (AUB), 2017-25, she led a series of interconnected workshops, projects and exhibitions with students from fine art, architecture and animation. She is Professor Emerita in Contemporary Drawing Practice at AUB and continues to work ogether with the University's drawing research group.
She completed a large series of unique artist’s books in response to rare plants in Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh's (RBGE) Herbaria and protected forest and coastal areas of Southern India. These works, presented by Galerie DRUCK und BUCH, Vienna, led directly on from her Leverhulme Research Fellowship, Sensing & Presencing Rare Plants through Contemporary Drawing Practice, (2017-21) – during thie Fellowship she collaborated closely with subject specialists at RBGE and was Guest Artist-in-Residence at Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, India set in a remote region of moist deciduous rainforest.
From 2025-28, as Honorary Research Associate and Artist-in-Residence at the Economic Botany Collection, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, she is carrying out a project which offers the opportunity to explore the integral relationship between the natural world and culture. She is also a QEST Scholar (2025-27) working with Japanese artisans whose practices embody ecological heritage. She is based in Brighton and the Outer Hebrides.