Hannah Rowan’s work explores the slippery complexities of water that draws together a liquid relationship between the human body and geological and ecological systems. She works across sculpture, installation, performance, video and sound to explore the uncertain form of materials.
“Tides in the Body” explores the intertidal realm and watery embodiment that is informed by her recent residency in Greenland. The title for the exhibition is borrowed from a phrase by Virginia Woolf and is further elaborated on by Hydrofeminist theorist Astrida Neimanis: “Water as body; water as communicator between bodies; water as facilitating bodies into being. Entity, medium, transformative and gestational milieu. All of this enfolding in, seeping from, sustaining and saturating, our bodies of water. ‘There are tides in the body,’ writes Virginia Woolf.” (Neimanis, 2017)
The main space of the gallery includes sculptures in cast bronze, hand blown glass, melting ice and ceramics. The back room of the gallery shows a video projection of a performance film exploring the movement of ocean tides and melting ice in Greenland. The intertidal realm is further explored through a series of wall-based ceramics, cyanotypes, and photography.
The intertidal realm is a liminal space on the shore between high and low tide, where land and sea meet, the intertidal zone is underwater during high tide and exposed to air during low tide. Rowan’s work takes ideas of porous and leaky boundaries to work with motifs of saltwater, tidal movements, melting ice and aquatic beings who inhabit the intertidal realm such as oysters, muscles, seaweed, jellyfish and octopus.
Rowan is informed by Hydrofeminist theory and feminist new materialism in her research and sculpture, she is interested in exploring material intimacy, touch, memory, gesture and the relationship between the body and earth’s living system. Her sculptures and performances dissolve boundaries between self and other and explore a merging of human and non-human bodies. Central to her work are ideas of transformation, ephemerality and becoming, her sculptures foreground material liveness, animacy and interaction.
Rowan’s work involves an ephemeral chain of events unfolding through material states: transformation, growth, reaction, adaptation, evolution and degradation, and reflects upon an essence of time in which the relationship between different materials act upon or support each other. As she explains, “I am interested in working with a wide array of materials and forming intricate connections and assemblages with these elements through a fluid process.” “Often water plays a role in relation to the material states of these other components,” the artist continues. Rowan finds deep relationships between elements often considered inanimate but in fact just operate on different timescales.
Curated by
Tatiana Martyanova
at C+N Gallery CANEPANERI, Milan
until April 24, 2023