Rosalind Howdle
2022
50 x 40 cm
Oil on canvas
£1,260

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Rosalind Howdle (b. 1997) (she/her) is a British-American artist based in London. She studied Painting at the Royal College of Art (2022), and at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL (2019). She has also studied 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. She has attended the RCA as a recipient of the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship (2020-22). She has exhibited in London, Vancouver, Berlin, and Milan.

The act of representing something is philosophically rich, problematic even, but it is the mutability of representation possible in painting that Rosalind Howdle is driven by. For her, figuration is alive. Her subjects are often reimagined natural forms and processes like evolution, reproduction, and self-repair. The organic and the hybrid are a means to skew recognisability, and hence challenge the categorical impulse of language. She don't attempt this through reduction – this is not a journey into abstraction, but a journey out of categorisation. Her recent series of work is an inquiry into the nature of love and care. What happens at the boundary between two people, two paintings, or two entities - human and non-human, living and non-living? One can see her practice as a tapestry, of which each canvas is a cropped section. The paintings need one another in their display; propped up or lent on by another piece, they take on 'mutual supporting roles'. Concepts of decoration and frivolity are conceived of a means of subversion. Through her work we may see art as a place to rest one's head, to undo learned hierarchies, and to respond to collective traumas with tenderness.