Exhibition Award | Caroline Bowles
Each year GOMA awards selected recent graduates in Ireland with an exhibition. A panel of judges chose from a pool of talented graduates from SETU Waterford, MTU Crawford College of Art and Design, Limerick School of Art and Design – highlighting the wealth of talent graduating annually across the country,
My work is mainly figurative and embodied in nature with free flowing abstracted elements. I use multiple layers of wet and dry drawing and painting media: inks, acrylic paint washes, charcoal and pastel on paper and large canvases, sometimes with audio or video elements.
Excavating my own past learnings of study and travel in Asia, of meditation, calligraphy, Qi Gong, acupuncture practice and music training, I find myself reimaging figurative and abstract postures which express something of movement, fluidity and power and how it is held emotionally in the human frame.
The embodied act of painting, touching in just enough to capture the figure in movement, allowing them to emerge on the canvas until they are barely visible keeps these images gestural, active and authentic. Through painting and drawing I explore visual expressions of the beauty of enacted truth in gesture, movement and the passage of time.
The dramatic colours and emotional expression of Francis Bacon, Sargy Mann and Paula Rego as well as the abstract movement of Judith Godwin and Zao Wou-Ki, all inspire my work.
Caroline Bowles
Image: Caroline Bowles with dancer Inma Pavon