Contemporary artist, Arwen Flowers’ paintings, are expressive and gestural. The conventions of abstract expressionism do not govern them; instead, they focus on drawing upon affect relations and body memory of repetitive and habitual actions associated with acts of care.
Flowers builds affective relationships within the painting with tone, colour and mark-making by wiping and scrubbing at paints and mediums. Dialogues emerge between her subconscious and conscious self as she manipulates materials on surfaces. Paint records and dictates her movements as she adds and removes material deposited in splashes, smears, puddles and sprinkles to reveal her body’s language on her substrate. Flowers has let go of traditional artists’ brushes in favour of sponges and cloths to prioritise haptic senses of sight and touch. Drawn to materials that convey abject textures reminiscent of messiness and borrowed colour from her surroundings, she examines her body’s ability to remember and express its voice.
More than tracings of her motions, Flowers’ paintings are conversations steeped in the whys of her body’s endeavours. Although derived from personal experience, they transcend being just a diaristic record of her actions to carry encoded meaning. By corralling and intervening in paints and mediums, she develops a creative dialogue between their material properties and herself as a maker. The emerging forms language literal and metaphorical relationships between chaos and order, care and agency.
Flowers is located in Auckland, has three children and moves between the structure and routines of her home and the open-plan freedom of her studio practice. She revels in the non-structured, horizonless, close-touch and sight painting methods as pigments converge, separate, materialise, and dissolve on the substrate. In these moments, her internally held feelings for life’s experiences become altered and reformed, enabling perspective shifts. Still, despite the interventions, Flower’s emerging body-made gestures, expressed in and through the messiness of her paintings, are never quite tamed.
Flowers builds affective relationships within the painting with tone, colour and mark-making by wiping and scrubbing at paints and mediums. Dialogues emerge between her subconscious and conscious self as she manipulates materials on surfaces. Paint records and dictates her movements as she adds and removes material deposited in splashes, smears, puddles and sprinkles to reveal her body’s language on her substrate. Flowers has let go of traditional artists’ brushes in favour of sponges and cloths to prioritise haptic senses of sight and touch. Drawn to materials that convey abject textures reminiscent of messiness and borrowed colour from her surroundings, she examines her body’s ability to remember and express its voice.
More than tracings of her motions, Flowers’ paintings are conversations steeped in the whys of her body’s endeavours. Although derived from personal experience, they transcend being just a diaristic record of her actions to carry encoded meaning. By corralling and intervening in paints and mediums, she develops a creative dialogue between their material properties and herself as a maker. The emerging forms language literal and metaphorical relationships between chaos and order, care and agency.
Flowers is located in Auckland, has three children and moves between the structure and routines of her home and the open-plan freedom of her studio practice. She revels in the non-structured, horizonless, close-touch and sight painting methods as pigments converge, separate, materialise, and dissolve on the substrate. In these moments, her internally held feelings for life’s experiences become altered and reformed, enabling perspective shifts. Still, despite the interventions, Flower’s emerging body-made gestures, expressed in and through the messiness of her paintings, are never quite tamed.
“…all this tactile stuff that you could or would touch, that connects the painting to the end of your arm. Painting for the maker is not retinal; it is a full-body experience.”
— Amy Silman.