Veiled Tree
Archival Inkjet
46.5 x 64.5 cm. Framed
Edition of 6
€1200 Framed

Under a Vaulted Sky explores sanctuary, as well as home, through landscapes, settlements and our underpinned relationships with belonging and abandonment.

For almost two years Rowan worked closely with a small community of people and their relationship to a deconsecrated Irish convent and its’ abandoned gardens, all of which were marked for demolition. Her collaborators consisted of the convents’ transient residents and its’ previously evicted nuns. The project looks at our relationship to home, primarily the garden and our cultural repetition of the need to control land at a pivotal time in Irish history. It also considers the struggle and acceptance of those people involved, all knowing that their home and sanctuary would be soon destroyed. As a consequence severing a long standing, ancient link of the site with nature, worship and propagation. An extensive body of work, it consists of portraits, still lives, field documentary and is intertwined with her own performative responses.

About the Artist

With a background in Fine Art, her predominately lens based works, incorporate documentary as well as collaborative and performative elements. Rowan is interested in layers of history in place, family and society, systems of defensive and offensive tactics used upon land, home and ritual. She recently graduated from Ulster University MFA in Photography with distinction. She received Ulster University’s Jill Todd Photography Award 2018 and was selected for recommendation by Alicia Hart for Source Magazine’s 2018 MA/MFA Photography Graduate feature. Recently selected by Paul Seawright and Peter Richards for exhibition in Dissolving Histories – New Narratives at Golden Thread Gallery.
paulinerowan.com