Lowena Hearn
Born in 1993, Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, UK.
Lives and works in London, UK.
Born in 1993, Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, UK.
Lives and works in London, UK.
Artist Statement
At its core, Lowena’s work is about finding symbolic forms of protection and sanctuary from her unsettled life. Themes of home, world-making and dreamscapes serve as a medium for the artist’s experience of childhood homelessness and mental illness. On a pictorial level, unconscious realms become an escape from the precarity of illness and poverty. On a material level, Lowena is exploring the porosity between domestic and “imaginary” spaces that can be facilitated by objects of symbolic passage: thresholds, portals, charms.
Her use of wood, textiles, bone, plaster, wax, shells and hints of ornate decoration are evocative of talismans and reliquaries, while her paintings embody the esoterica behind such sacred objects. It echoes the push and pull of the world of vision, divinity and the unconscious into the waking, living world. Everyday materials are made sacred by being regarded deeply: the very act of turning a tree into a board to paint on becomes mystical. Within everyday surroundings, preciousness is found in a private taxonomy of the sacred and mythological.
The home’s importance in Lowena’s practice lies, on one hand, in its frequent absence in her childhood, and the techniques of temporary or imaginary homebuilding that she and her mother would find. Here, inner worlds become places of shelter, something her childhood self would escape into. Its porous nature led her to pull what she could of the dreamscape into the world of the precarious home — creating nest-like beds on other people’s floors or keeping talismanic objects. In adulthood, this led to an acute attention to domestic surroundings, gathering precious and emotionally weighted “treasures” in an attempt to drag this divine unconscious place into the world of the home with a hope of echoing it.
On the other hand, the home’s resonance lies in its constant presence during chronic mental illness, where it is both prison and refuge, or, more firmly, a container against which thoughts and dreams strain. During long periods of illness it is common for manifestations within sleep to take on a place closer to reality than that of the physical waking world: when dreams are dynamic and the world is still.
Lowena views her paintings as objects of mediumship: A communion with hidden realms. They function as souvenirs or vestiges of this other world —just as relics are often presented to their finders in dreams and visions.