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Jeanette Fintz, Arts
& Antiques April, 1999 |
"Nancy Bowen’s pieces…begin their magic with the light weight "crafty" connotations of beads, wire, ribbon and glass. Through her imagination and belief, Bowen has invented a vocabulary of forms inextricably dependent upon their materials for their meaning. Bowen’s metaphors come from Hindu meditation practice and the medieval science of alchemy, which attempted to turn base metals into gold. Her engagement with glass- blowing extends the connection between materials and meaning to include process, since the glass itself is invoked as the furnace in which the male principle (sulphur) and the female principle (mercury) are conjoined to produce the philosopher’s stone and used here perhaps as a symbol of the gold of the artist’s enlightenment. The end product of transmuted polar sexual energy, also called the homunculous, a creature with a divine balance of both sets of characteristics and referred to in her drawings, is attributed to the melding of these dual forces in a glass chamber. Bowen’s work is rooted in a search for self evolution and her unifying metaphors equate the artist’s process and spiritual practice with the resulting product- a whole new image, the art object. " |
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William Zimmer The New York Times February 15, 1998 |
"Ms. Bowen is interested in the internal body- the heart, circulatory systems, ears. Sakti’s Charms is a figure divided into zones that might represent the seven chakras which in Hindu thought are subtle energy centers of the body. Ms. Bowen’s interest in India is verified by the gorgeous bed of yellow turmeric, the condiment that gives curry its color, on which the eponymous organ of "Black Heart" lies. Not all the materials Ms. Bowen uses are as ephemeral, but as Ms. Felshin points out in her catalogue essay that the artist uses primarily craft materials including glass, ribbon, beads, clay, copper and wire. Often her pieces resemble drawings in space, and while they might at first look insubstantial, they carry loads of meaning." |
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Susan Canning New Art Examiner April 1997 |
"Utilizing
a wide range of materials including clay, blown glass, hair, beads,
rubber, and ribbon fashioned into vessels that are fragile, biomorphic,
and quixotic, Nancy Bowen constructed for her recent exhibition
an environment filled with invention, wit, and transgressive pleasure. Walking
through the assembled sculptures was akin to entering a painting
by Hieronymous Bosch, where objective reality had been transformed
into a parallel universe via the artist’s fanciful imagination.
Focusing on bodily functions, Bowen gave visual form to the intangible
yet familiar activities of breathing, smelling, touching, and
hearing. In One Becoming Oneself protruding organic shapes made
of clay and rubber erase distinctions between human, plant and
animal even as the morphing shapes set up contrary dialogues of
hard and soft, opaque and translucent, viscous and solid. Whether
interpreted as the act of giving birth or of building form, this
pieces argues for the liberation of the sensual. This
notion of the senses as the origins of experience and bearers
of meaning was explored through a variety of sculptural forms
and witty titles. In Drawing Breath, Fecund Exhalation, and Apana
(Breathing Down) , acts of respiration become visual puns that
coincidentally explore the expressive possibilities of media often
associated with craft. In Sound Emerging Visible, a skein of copper
wire either emerges from or enters into an ear shaped form, creating
both a visual correspondence for felt rather than perceived experience
and an analogy between hearing and the process whereby thought
becomes form. |
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Karen Chambers, Review ArtNet (on-line) Jan 11, 1997 |
"Nancy
Bowen is a master of form. That, of course is what all good sculptors
are, but in her case it is not necessarily the comment that springs
to mind at first look- not glance because the work is too compelling.
The reason it strikes me as odd is that Bowen’s imagery usually
evokes an emotional response before a formal one. Bowen’s
forms are clearly derived from the body and thus recognizable,
but certainly not anatomically correct. Emotionally charged, her
rounded organic forms are deformed so they could be seen as menacing,
but equally as humorous. …Nancy
Bowen is also a master of materials, exploiting each for its physical
qualities and symbolic potential. Both the clay and glass of this
sculpture could be manipulated by hand-or breath-and this adds
another level of humanness…. Each of the sculptures in this show…works equally well on the visual and intellectual levels. They engage the sense, the heart, the mind." |
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Janet Koplos, Review Art in America February 1994 |
"Probably
Nancy Bowen’s sculptures are intended to discomfit. They
take familiar forms, from household objects to body parts, and
they use such ordinary materials as clay and wax and glass, but
the overall effect is to make viewers squirm… Bowen’s work seems to reflect a self-aware physicality and a sense of peril and disjunctiveness that are common to our time- a familiar postmodernism of the body. But more enlightening is her discovery of beauty where it would seem least likely to be found and her celebration of often cheap and retardataire materials. It’s this that makes her work disconcerting- and memorable." |
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Barry Schwabsky, Review Artforum January 1994 |
"These
days , Louise Bourgeois-inspired sculpture seems ubiquitous, but
Nancy Bowen gives a newly sharpened edge to biomorphic sculpture
through a finely calibrated use of diverse materials such as glass,
clay, bronze, wax and synthetic hair; witty and pointed extrapolations
of form; a cross-pollination of craft traditions with specifically
sculptural concerns; but especially through the intensity of her
investment with the by now stock thematics of "the body"…. It is the pure but never simple organic activity that is the consistent subject of Bowen’s sculptures…In the recognition of such affective intensitites lies the pleasure of Bowen’s work" |
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Arlene Raven, The Village Voice November 2, 1993 |
"A
division of the bony labyrinth of the inner ear and also the center
of hearing, the cochlea suggests a connection between loving and
listening as well as between the heart and the ear- or any two
disparate organic shapes. This connection is, one that Bowen attempts
in her twelve sculptures and four prints of the last two years,
is nothing less than the celebration of the complete orchestration
of the internal and external body, put together part by part.
Embryonic, balanced between ethereal and carnal, Bowen’s sculptures embody a consciousness of what it means to be matter. To have a body can mean: to be forbidden one’s own fruit; to attempt and fail at mind control; to accept your mortality, chin hairs and all. Bowen’s themes of self-sufficiency can take the form of Parthenogenesis, a nest of bronze-pigmented clay branches holding amorphous glass nurslings, or other three- dimensional configurations on tables and delicate stands that demonstrate an intimacy with the physiognomy of insides. Elegantly elongated contours and silhouettes of black clay, pink glass, bronze (synthetic) hair, and wax stick together in rare consanguinity. They have made an organic commitment; the nature of this conjunction raises the possibility of these elements being instruments for drawing the fullest feelings- allowing sameness and differences, intensifying energies, fusing heat, giving way." |
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