Propelling Her Shiny Vehicle

A continued investigation into the poetics of the automobile as emblematic of modern life and late capitalism; speed, leisure, status signifier, mass production, engineering, perceived freedom, drama, possibility and adventure. The vehicle is a recurrent motif throughout Cowling’s work; graceful lines, stylised postures and luxury interiors are fragmented and distorted, evoking a collision or a crash and a hint of a retro-futuristic landscape. The body and its gestures are often alluded to through form, scale and colour; car body parts, hard shoulders and disembodied limbs instil a gentle animism into the objects.

Negotiating between the contemporary urban and natural landscape; gleaming car showrooms, the monolithic shopping centre and homogenous retail parks are as much a source of stimuli as the romanticised expanse of a horizon-less desert. Polarised spatial languages are combined and integrated in these intermediary spaces, an intimate meditation on our complex and shifting landscapes.

Through meticulous engagement with form, process and detail, Cowling has developed a personal, poetic and gently surreal vocabulary. Indeterminable and delicate sculptural landscapes are littered with relic-like objects; the organic and sensual abutting the cold hard lines of post-modernism, creating precarious and atmospheric installations which speak of alienation, dislocation, ritual and place. 

Lucy Johnson

Dissolving boundaries between what we consider noise, sound and music, Johnson's work explores the role of the sonic experience in everyday life. Deconstructing and re-imagining the order and hierarchy central to the conventional experience of sound, she creates disorientating and provocative sonic tapestries, binding abstraction and familiarity.  

Johnson's sound piece for ‘propelling her shiny vehicle’ simultaneously compliments and frustrates the subtle and indefinable nature of Cowling's sculptural practice.

Fragments of sound from the subliminal experience of modern life are excavated and contorted, to provoke and underpin the presence of Cowling's restless installation.