Standpoint is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Harriet Bowman (b.1990, N. Devon), winner of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award 2024/25.
Did you know that only the female mosquitoes bite? They puncture the skin using a special mouth part called a proboscis that acts as a tube to suck blood through…
Harriet Bowman’s practice is multi-faceted, making sculpture through an intensive process of learning, testing and experimentation. She examines the vulnerability of the body in relation to materials and the bodies of others within the processes of production.
‘Slow Puncture’ presents a new series of sculptures developed over the past year as the 22nd winner of the leading UK Award for emerging sculptors. In this new work, Bowman explores language, industry and secondary use of materials through a range of media, including glass, metal, rubber and ceramics.
Her process investigates materials and by spending time in places of industry Bowman embeds herself to better understand their behaviours and transmutations. An intimate understanding of her materials’ cycles focuses our attention on events taking place below the surface.
Bowman has been looking closely at tyre production, investigating what happens next, where the material goes, and finding they become playground surfaces to absorb falls or when shipped overseas become breeding grounds for mosquitoes, who lay their eggs in the stagnant water collected within the doughnuts.
Glass, including smashed car windows, is a primary material explored in the work, with the artist investigating its fluidity when hot and ability to shatter when hit. The origins of the event providing the repurposed material are central – a fist through a passenger door window creating an opportunity to gather fallen glass from the roadside to be fired. At the same time Bowman draws in the glass by burning horsehair between fused panels. Bowman’s interactions are evidenced in traces and lines around which the glass swells and stretches thin, almost to breaking point.
References to the fallibility of the body in relation to the vehicle are abundant in the work. Blown glass headrests undergo a different kind of impact by the artist, punched by the heat of the kiln forcing a secondary collapse. Welded metal stands form a language of holding, presenting and protecting for the audience to peer into the slumped underbelly of tyre depressions.
Bowman brings her shadow collaborators to the fore, those around us carrying out unseen and unlikely practices of production, work and care. She uses this term to describe the various people, animals and machines that she works with and learns from. These include people who vacuum clean glass from cars after break-ins, shred tyres once they are worn, people who lift tyres into mangles or haul hides across tanning room floors for car seats, and others that remove a car windscreen after a piece of tarmac has flicked up and shattered it.
For more information, visit Standpoint Gallery
For more information click here
