Rosalind Howdle (b. 1997) is a British-American artist based in London.
She studied Painting at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL (2019). She has also studied the Rhode Island School of Design (U.S.) and Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Canada).
She was awarded the Vanguard Prize in 2019. She has attended the RCA as a recipient of the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship (2020-22).
She has exhibited in London, Vancouver, Berlin, and Milan.
The act of representing something is philosophically rich, problematic even, but it is the mutability of representation possible in art that I am driven by. For me, figuration is alive. The metamorphoses taking place in the course of painting seem to mimic the biological processes that underpin my subject matter: evolution, reproduction, and self-repair. Organic forms regularly appear but are inaccurate, misremembered, or perhaps reimagined. By skewing recognisability and skirting definition, one can access a kind of non-verbal intelligibility that is painting-specific. Letters and words sometimes appear in the work. They play games with legibility, owing much to the form-over-function aesthetic sensibilities of calligraphy and graffiti. I wish to challenge the categorical impulse of language, but not through reduction. This is not a journey into abstraction, but a journey out of categorisation, and thus possibly out of learned hierarchies. My recent series of work looks at the subversive capacities of decoration and frivolity, and more generally, is an inquiry into the nature of love and care. I’m interested in what happens at the boundary between two people, two entities, or two paintings – in the electric charge of the dividing line.
