ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE: BURFORD HOUSE & JOHN TREASURE'S GARDEN, SHROPSHIRE 1996
& SOLO EXHIBITION, HART GALLERY, LONDON 1998
Double Summertime was a series of works produced during and following a residency at Burford House, Shropshire which is surrounded by John Treasure’s Garden. The set of stairs to the top floor of the large country house had been sold during the 1950's in order to fund the development of the garden; a temporary staircase was constructed to allow Bowen access to eight full-height rooms. She proceeded to make a large series of drawings on wallpaper she stripped from these interiors. Dating from the late nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century, these papers carried an inherent sense of history – flowers, seeds and weeds were brought inside from the gardens and as they dried and withered, were drawn onto/into, the retrieved paper supports.
1997 Pigment & pencil on paper 9.5" x 7"
"These objects – what to call them – exist in the very condition of transition. ‘Drawing’ is not an adequate description of them for the term implies that our attention should be on the pencil mark, the smudge of pigment – that we pay special regard to the ‘sign’ made upon the support by the artist. Such signs worked onto the ‘grounds’ (Bowen’s own revealing term) of fragments of the wallpaper found on the walls of the long-disused and sealed upper rooms of Burford House, are a kind of denial, as all art is, of entropy; they constitute a metaphorical ‘informing’ of things, an assimilation of them into meaning."
Mel Gooding