Thursday 12 July 2007
6:00pm – 8:00pm
Siân Bowen: Gaze
Daiwa Foundation Japan House
Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
As Artist-in-Residence in Drawing at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Siân Bowen spent 18 months exploring an eclectic group of objects from the collections. This led to the use of an 18th century Claude Glass and contemporary laser cutters as drawing aids, journeys to rural Japanese paper workshops and dialogues with curators and conservators. The resulting body of drawings examine light, touch and materiality, and combine traditional and non-traditional drawing processes.
This new book contextualises Siân’s recent work from a number of perspectives. It documents the two exhibitions of her work which resulted from the residency – “Siân Bowen: Drawing, Context and the Collection” at the V&A and “Shift”, an installation of large scale drawings shown at Kyoto Art Centre, Japan. It also discusses the impact that the 19th century Harry S.Parkes Collection of Japanese paper has had of the development of this new work.
“What unites this inventive diversity is Siân Bowen’s resourceful ability to fuse ancient and modern methods of working. While using paper treated in ways employed since the tenth century, she always remains open to contemporary modes of expression. Within the deliberate confines that she has set herself, an energising sense emerges of the rich and audacious possibilities for drawing today. Her new work is immensely rewarding; it makes us conscious above all of the inexhaustible tension between presence and absence, palpability and the void. ”
– extract from “Shift and Gaze” by Richard Cork, 2007
‘Siân Bowen: Gaze’ edited by Gill Saunders with essays by Gill Saunders, Richard Cork, Tony Godfrey and Pauline Webber (Art Editions North in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum) will be available on the day for £13.
About the contributors
Siân Bowen
Siân Bowen studied Fine Art at Newcastle University and Edinburgh College of Art and in 1985 took up a Monbusho Scholarship to Kyoto City University of Arts, where she studied traditional Japanese painting methods and materials. She remained in Japan until 1989 and a touring exhibition of her work formed part of the 1991 Japan Festival. During her residency at the V&A, she took up an invitation to spend two months as Guest Artist at Kyoto Art Centre. An enduring interest in Japanese handmade paper led her to visit craft-workers throughout Japan, such as indigo dyers and kimono stencil cutters – an experience which informed the new works recently exhibited at the V&A. Siân Bowen’s work is held in major public collections including the British Museum and V&A.
Gill Saunders
Gill Saunders (chair) is Senior Curator (Prints) in the Word & Image Department at the V&A. She has written widely on prints and drawings. Her publications include Picturing Plants: An Analytical History of Botanical Illustration (1995) and Wallpaper in Interior Decoration (2002). Her most recent book is Prints Now: Directions and Definitions (with Rosie Miles, 2006).