Mary Bowen

Mary Bowen is a British artist exploring our fragile relationship with the natural world - interrogating our connection to it at a time of environmental change.

Her practice grows from close attention to the landscape, shaped by memories and moments of encounter, and the immediate environment surrounding her Dartmoor studio. Her paintings offer an intimate sense of these wandering and marginal places, from heathland and tors to ancient lichen and shifting weather patterns. She seeks to allow her body and mind to wander toward the liminal, being alert in solitude, and interrogating the thoughts that come from being truly present in nature.

Her process begins with fluid acrylic poured, rubbed and wiped into raw canvas, allowing colour to drift and merge. These early shapes evolve into layered marks, detailed brushwork and forms that envelop the viewer and establish an immersive experience. Muted tones are used to evoke the sensory memories of the landscape and the bodily experience of being in it, both internal and external. Surfaces are built up through painterly layers, creating depth and texture that reference the physicality of the terrain.

The result is a body of work that invites the viewer to slow down and connect more deeply with a disappearing landscape. Not divided between the digital and the physical, but attentive to the body’s presence in nature and the restoration found through an ancient relationship to place. Bowen’s paintings encourage contemplation while remaining visceral, rooted in an embodied, layered process that evokes elemental force and human longing.

I started off my professional career as a printmaker - both teaching and making work that explored the environment and printmaking process. Since returning to painting I have enjoyed the immediacy of working on canvas, building layers intuitively and challenging myself with scale and colour. 
I am interested in moving into more sustainable processes and creating work that reflects and upholds the natural environment. With my subject matter but also with the materials and paints that I use.