Hannah Rowan, Tides in the Body, solo show at Canepaneri C+N Gallery, Milan, Italy.
7 March to 24 April 2023
press release
exhibition essay

On Tidal Politics of Touch
Anastasia (A) Khodyreva

All that is begins with a touch. Tides are of touch, too. Of a muddy frothy dance. Of a persistent and tentative with-ness of soils and rocks, salts and waters, of the Moon’s gravitational forces, Earth’s orbital attunement to the Moon, but also of (micro)organisms, bacteria, heat and cold, of nuanced climates that unwearyingly blueprint a tidal shoreline. Tides are never fully present and yet eternally alive. Tidal ambivalence might be precisely that spacetime where Hannah Rowan lures one to be at the currently over-heating socio-ecological moment that craves alternative - for Hannah, hydrofeminist (Neimanis 2012) - world. Imagining and sensing away from the crisis of extractive reproductive touch and its unlivable imaginaries of a body as a sealed, solid and sovereign entity, she invites to stay with ambivalence with her Tides In The Body, a solo show I walk, sniff, and touch in early March of Milan and with this snippet of a text.

As I walk through the unbreathable dust of Milan toward Tides In The Body, I feel swallowing anticipation of aquatic encounters. I am walking with a hopeful tickle of a reference to Virginia Woolf’s work and our years-long hydrofeminist conversations with Hannah about & with the planetary waters. As I step into the gallery space, I, curiously, do not feel a breeze. Neither do I immediately sense any other aqueous presence. Instead, I am pierced by heat by Prima Materia, a particle of Fagradalsfjall’s volcanic dust encapsulated into a glass ball held by Hannah’s cast bronze hands that greets and hits me with the sensation of nearly touching a screaming hot iron. The tiny particle radiates its agency; the glass in gentle palms emboldens it. Flushed by a cautious sweaty sensation of nearly burning myself, I wonder if this glass ball secures the primaeval matter or, instead, secures the artist’s hands and me from the matter that, in alchemy, is known to be all that the world is. I wonder if my body sweats since it assumes-imagines this glass ball as a bulb of ice that will melt and if I am to feel fragile. Or if I am to feel dangerous? Who is touching who? Is it possible to stay untouched? How to tend to this touchy encounter?

Dwelling on this ambivalent sensorial grasp, I crave a tidal breeze to soothe me, feeling tides of sweat in my pondering body. These tides feel to be a touch of their very own kind. This kind unfurls, unfolds, and lasts. It is not momentarily. Instead, it comes across as an ever-layering moody caress that is hardly graspable. It is a duration that blurs the boundaries of bodies and times. Yet again, who is touching who, and what is the temporality of this touch?

Inhale. Exhale. Feel the tides in your body (Rowan 2020). Feel tides as a distinctive bodying composed of elemental and interpersonal encounters but also political intimacies (ethical or otherwise) that, in attunement to the Moon and murks of the heated globality, is continuously re/made. A tidal ever-layering body might be a sibling to ice, Hannah’s long-term material and conceptual companion sensitive to all that is weathering (Sharpe 2016; Neimanis and Hamilton 2018; Malatino 2023) in planetary atmospheres. Layered histories-currents of the planetary becoming, at once, both possibilities and potentials (Massumi 2002; Lear 2018) oozing from bodies being in touch. Following tides with Hannah but also with a feminist philosopher Erin Manning, I wonder if they haptically evoke uncertainty as an alternative stable ground of “relational time-space, provisional embodiments [that] sense in layers, in textures, in rhythms and juxtapositions that defy strict organisation” (Manning 2006, xiv)? May one learn from tides how to layer sensitive ethics of touch for the heated socio-environmental now?

Next, I slide along the wall to quickly stumble upon what first comes across as the enlarged flexion creases of Hannah’s palms and that unfold as Desert Vessel, a cyanotype that blues into the space the textures of the Atacama Desert. I am ‘heat’ by another artwork, by its momentary cutaneous confusion that makes me sense-think of politics of touch that drains. Heat. Caution. Alert. Awareness. And once again, ambivalence: as a cyanotype, does not Desert Vessel emerge when the solar light caresses chemically alert paper? And isn’t it the volcanic heat that spat out the dust of Prima Materia from the planetary crust? The solar heat and the heat of Earth’s core, the two arduously ambivalent mights that dry up and ensure life. Whose life, though?

Where do tides begin? What is the time they make? If their fluted, in/coherent yet rhythmic time is Earth’s or planetary time, then time must be a multiplicity. In turn, what is the time of the socio-environmental crisis? If anything, it is untidal, that is, chrononormative (e.g. Freeman 2010), exhausting, unlivable, and infuriating. In the gallery space, I seek a soothing touch away from the heavy untidal time I know with my body-mind. And I am sensed: I am led into the soothing humid darkness of the other gallery room. It hosts Tides in the Body, an audio-video essay eponymous with the show. It first sores with salty airs of the open water winds projected-stretched over the wall to immediately alleviate with the swaying lull of the Arctic seascape. The seascape centres an iceberg. Sharply white, it is drifting, and Hannah’s bare milky warm body on and with it. Her body tactilуly attunes to the quasi-solid body of ice. The movement not nauseating but hypnotising. Two planetary bodies curve in their porous cutaneous conversation, seeping into each other from different scales, with different life speeds, and with bodily certainty that they are no entities capable of aligning with the heated dominant Western binary abstractions.

The screen tweaks the scene: the iceberg drafted outside the frame, and now the Arctic brash ice contours the shoreline. Enveloped in the neoprene costume, Hannah stretches her arms towards the slippery crystalline lumps but does not strive to grab and hold them tight. She is learning from their crystalline collaboration, from their stubborn doing-in-common (Neimanis 2012). Touch and its politics are, indeed, a slippery business.

Hypnotised by the slippery encounters, I step outside the humid darkness. I might have rushed outside too swiftly: I feel another tide of sudden sweat for Undersea, an oyster colony made of porcelain, black stoneware and glaze, begins to swing notoriously. The porcelain hangs down at me. In this quiet and sudden potentially cracking and crumbling moment of tension, a need for a vulnerable attunement surfaces. Undersea in-tense-ionally invigorates sensorium and visually nudges to remember capitalist modern/colonial (Lugones 2007; 2010) hierarchies-verticalities driven by and fuelling thirst for reproduction. The oyster colony here is not hidden in an industrial farm. Neither does it rest on a bed of crushed ice when dismembered for a restaurant plate affordable for some. It is pushing down upon me. Face us! - they whisper, making me look up, tweaking my sensorial coordinates, disorienting. They do not scream; they seamlessly drown me into the abyss where they dwell and grow in a tight community. Oysters, inherently precarious tidal bodies that cling, hold their gill-ed breath and whisper that there is nothing wrong with a tight hold if one holds precisely to ethical communal futurity.

And as I am about to step away, they haptically glaze rhymes with … dolphin or whale skin. Does this precariously swinging colony glare kinships with the mammalian oceanic creatures? Or does it in-tense-ionally pulls towards a multispecies kinship (for some - to stay with, for others - to nurture)? Here, to echo Walter Benjamin with liberties, haptic colours are not lifeless things or rigid individualities but winged or marine creatures that flit from one form to the next (Benjamin 2004). The blue and green hues might be flitting towards an exquisitely weaved critical poetics of a Black feminist poet, writer, independent scholar, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs and her Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020). Above all, Undersea colours might be layering towards an alternative politics of being in touch with critical decolonial practices, with lands back, waters back, and airs back.

Pulling myself away from Undersea, I arrive at Vessels of Touch, two small basins full of ice, standing on metal rods, encircled into a duo by a copper plate and a rock of salt that absorb waters dripping down from the top. The ice drips in attunement to Ocean Held, a glass vessel that balances on another material rod that holds a vessel and, in it, a piece of ice cast as an oyster shell. Both stand out as vibrant situations where the artist’s hands once again are touching towards uncertainty as a generative place to be for an alternative critical politics of touch. This time, the artwork unequivocally stages where touch that grabs leads - towards the planetary melting. Hannah’s companion, ice, this queer body of water that drifts the oceans and cracks metal pipes, lands its melting body for that. One cannot hold this aquatic trickster too tight even if one tries. It escapes, melting, evaporating, making puddles that unfurl on the metal surface, shape-echoing Tentacular, a circle of ceramic tentacles that colourfully rhymes with Undersean and that rests on the gallery wall to my left. Wording and worlding with the titles between the three artworks, Hannah seems to pull us to a realisation that a vessel is not simply a container that preserves pre-existing entities. Rubbing the titles against the material situations of her artworks, Hannah suggests a slight but powerful challenge-tweak of imagination: for a mind-body that refuses dominant Western thinking in sovereign entities, vessels do not solidly isolate but stand for nascent material intimacies. There is nothing solidly hard, everything is hardly solid. Even rocks liquify and evaporate becoming ephemeral fragrant cloud of Petrichor (Living Waters), a metal construction that might be speculatively forming a new chemical formula with all of its branches, holding more glass and more ice in its many containers of potential.

Vessels are relations and Tides in The Body is one of such vessels. The show gently but persistently pulls one towards their sensing, radically open and tentacularly connected body. It gradually layers nuanced sensorial attention to movement with the artworks and, beyond their material bodies, to the matters that caused the global heat of the socio-environmental crisis. Violent touch of extractive capitalism, modern/colonial unliveable and unbelievable sovereign bodies, precarity of actually living and breathing ones, exhaustion, vulnerability but never weakness, and collective critique and subversion that do not only happen in the streets or in parliaments but in and with slight shifts towards or amplification of existing critical imaginaries. These shifts or amplifications are called in to carve alternative - wet - futures which would not grab, but, instead, reach out, plant, water, caress, and tend. The shifts towards subversive politics that happens at the tips of one’s fingers (Neimanis 2017), a politics that does not take touch for granted and, as feminist theorist of care Maria Puig de la Bellacasa warns, does not equate any gesture of touch or of being touched physically with being in touch with oneself, the other (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 99), let alone, being in care-ful touch. May a politics of care-ful touch that never pre-exists a tactile encounter be the prima materia for a hydrofemnist world that lives in attunement to the tidal time? And if so, what membranes can hold it?

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Tides in the Body
2023, performance film, 4k, 14:04.
filmed and photographed on location in Greenland
please email if you would like link to watch the full video.

Triple Point at Belo Campo, Lisboa.
curated by Alice Bonnot.

Triple Point is a solo exhibition by British artist Hannah Rowan whose practice reflects on the contrast between constant, fast-paced human activity and the much slower rhythms of geological processes. Her work, often inspired by living nature, not only observes these natural systems; it re- embodies them.

Evaporation, condensation and precipitation, Rowan recreates ephemeral natural system in a continued state of becoming to reflect on their fragility. She explores notions of fluidity, transformation and interconnectivity to speak of the existential threat and anxiety surrounding the climate crisis in connection to other cosmological forces such as technology and data overload.

Informed by the Hydrofeminism of Astrida Neimanis*, she invites us to reflect on our presence as and with bodies of water. To slow down, engage and connect to wider ecological systems.

For her first solo exhibition in Lisbon, Rowan presents a new body of work that captures the moving quality of water, frequently between states of matter. By building on the existing attributes of Belo Campo, an old underground wine cellar, the exhibition aims to simulate a slippery groundwater dependent ecosystem, comparable to subterranean wetlands and caves dripping sounds of water permeating through lithic surfaces.

The first two rooms hold Flowing as Frozen a glass and ice condensation piece. The ice placed inside the hand blown glass vessel begins as a solid crystal, melts into a flowing liquid, before cooling and condensing within the glass amorphous solid.

Resonating within the cavernous acoustics of the second chamber, the video Anatomy of Ice is the documentation of a performance Rowan developed in Svalbard during the Arctic Circle Residency (2019), an artist-led research expedition. With a hydrophone submerged in the ocean, she was able to capture the loss of ancient air bubbles that once trapped in the ice became frozen archives of the atmosphere.

In the third room, the atmospheric conditions of Belo Campo shape the material transmutations for Saturation Point, a sweating salt and copper mist piece echoing the continuous circulation of water in the Earth-atmosphere system. In return, the steel sculpture, scaled to the artist’s body, exaggerates the humidity of the room by staging alchemical reactions between materials acting upon each other.

While navigating below ground, the viewer encounters water merging through physical states. Each work amplifies the humid and moist atmospheric conditions of the three adjoining chambers, and blurs the boundaries of the three main phases of the water transformation cycle — solid, liqui and gas. Such phases can coexist at the same time if a certain degree of temperature and pressure is reached. A unique combination that scientists call: Triple Point.

* Intersectional feminist scholar, author of Bodies of Water, Posthuman Feminist Phenomelogy (2017). Bloomsbury Academic.

text by Alice Bonnot
images here

Belo Campo is an epiphyte space for contemporary cultures initiated and run by Adrien Missika and hosted by Galeria Francisco Fino. It is located in the basement of the gallery in a former wine cellar.

Belo Campo is a not-for-profit structure that aims to infuse and diffuse ideas, experiment with space and time, propose and question formats of contemporary cultures.

A World Without End

Duo Show Gillian Brett & Hannah Rowan, Curated by Sara Dolfi Agostini. 2024

C+N Gallery CANEPANERI Genoa is delighted to present A World Without End, dual solo show by Gillian Brett & Hannah Rowan, curated by Sara Dolfi Agostini.

In the preface of The Cyborg Manifesto (1985), the influential American academic Donna J. Haraway envisioned a world without gender, without beginning and without end – free from the ideological dictates of Western capitalist thought and entrusted to a new hybrid entity, a synthesis of human and machine. Forty years later, a symbiotic and emancipated relationship with technology seems impossible in light of the authoritarian and expansionist tendencies that interconnect the physical and digital worlds. In the dual solo exhibition by Brett and Rowan a world without end imagined by Haraway takes on hallucinatory traits, featuring fragmented, replicating bodies, sensory short circuits, and material transformations.

Their practices, in some ways complementary, offer a similar physical involvement between the artist's body and the materials, producing in the viewer a pervasive sense of vulnerability. In this way, they suggest counterpoints, or breaks in the compact vision that intertwines technological progress and societal evolution, meeting conceptually not only in the processes and formalization of the work, yet also in the initial theoretical impulse. Indeed, their artistic thought equally incorporates a reflection on the fluids that permeate and define reality, from living bodies to technology. The artists subject these fluids to alchemical processes of fusion and crystallization, echoing the different stages of transformation of the surrounding environment, both natural and anthropogenic in origin. As noted by Esther Leslie in the seminal text "Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form" (2016), fluids are the liquid crystals of screens appropriated by Brett and the neutron stars replicated on their surface; the water, glass, and volcanic magma of Rowan; the aluminum alloys and molten metals in the casts of simulated bodies in artistic form by both. After all, fluid is the primordial soup.

ON MATTER AND ENERGY
Hannah Rowan Stafano Cagol duo show A Pick Gallery Turin, curated by C+N Canepaneri, 2023.

Two artists who resonate on the same wavelength, despite their differences, Stefano Cagol (Trento, 1969) and Hannah Rowan (Brighton, 1990), exhibit together for the first time in a poetic yet alarming display. Their work delves into the capacity to engage with the elements and the spirit of the elements. Both have tackled the transformations of matter as the origin of current environmental issues and societal crises, starting with water, an essential element for all living beings, and the loss of ice. Rowan aligns with the principles of hydrofeminism, while Cagol is known for his renowned piece The Ice Monolith, left to melt at the Venice Biennale in 2013, coinciding with the release of Timothy Morton's "Hyperobjects," leading to discussions about floods and humans as a flood. In the exhibition, Cagol and Rowan each present a recent impactful video work and a series of installation pieces. Both artists are represented by C+N Gallery CANEPANERI (Milan/Genoa, Italy).
The title of Hannah Rowan's video work, Tides in the Body, is a quote from Virginia Woolf, also used by hydrofeminist Astrida Neimanis, author of "Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology." The English artist explores our intricate relationship with water, geological and ecological systems, venturing into the far north, the seas of Greenland, where she bravely – yet perilously – stands on an iceberg. "I wanted to learn about ice through the seeping form of my fleshy body, ice against skin, membrane against membrane. The ice was slippery," she writes in her diary, recalling those moments. She continues, "As I lay with my left ear pressed against the hard, cold surface and my eyes turned towards theocean, I could feel the internal movement of the ice. I listened to the digestive gurgles of the ice being metabolized by contact with the warmer seawater and the air temperature." Rowan then stops on the coast and embraces a block of ice, naked, vulnerable, yet in total harmony, embodying a maternal protective stance toward our water reserves and our future.
On the other hand, Stefano Cagol has repeatedly used fire as a symbol of our antagonistic attitude toward nature, our desire for dominance, and anthropogenic influence on global warming and ice disappearance. In the exhibition, we find the video work "Far Before and After Us," created for last year's Venice Biennale, in the Perak-Malaysia state pavilion, where the artist ignites a torch in a snowy, rugged mountain landscape, reminiscent of ancient geological eras preceding human presence, opening up to a possible future beyond us. "Cagol has developed his own theories," as Elisa Barison notes in a recent essay dedicated to the artist's research. "He is convinced that the birth of the Anthropocene can be equated with our ancestors' discovery of fire. At that moment, humans began to rise above other living beings and gained the ability to manipulate, transform matter, and thus produce much more energy than they biologically need to survive."

Solo show at the White Crypt, curated by Anais Lerendu, 17.11.2018 - 08.12.2018

Bodies of Water: Age of Fluidity questions the relationship between the human and the non-human; from the organic to the technological. Rowan analyses ideas of water, time, ecology and the ephemeral through a vast array of materials and components, including natural or fabricated materials, along with everyday objects.

The exhibition explores these ideas through utilising notions of circulation, change and becoming. Through the natural and physical processes of the transforming states of materials; such as melting ice, running water, oxidising copper and crystallizing salt. Rowan highlights a material’s specific relationship to time, with different materials and processes having unique timescales.

Within the exhibition the various parts and elements of the installation are interconnected via countless pipes and tubes. The installation becomes a circulatory system, akin to veins and arteries in a body. This circulatory system connects the synthetic elements and natural materials which meet and merge into one. Rowan looks at how these inanimate objects might relate to the animate or ogranism. Her installations can be thought of as ecologies of assembled materials, including technology and information. They are precarious systems in the state of entropy mirroring our own global ecology.

Rowan challenges the concept of the isolated self in these watery systems. Writing about the implications of thinking about water in relation to the philosophy of the self, Astrida Neimanis has stated: ‘As watery, we experience ourselves less as isolated entities, and more oceanic eddies...Dietics falter. Our comfortable categories begin to erode’1. Indeed, as part of a global community, human and non-human, our current position is determined by an increasing state of liquid fluidity that stretches across the physical and the virtual terrain, the earth and the screen. Rowan’s work embodies this deep sense of interconnection.

As the temperature of our planet rises, ice caps fracture, drift apart and melt away into rising sea levels. Rowan’s practice explores the acceleration of ecological dissolution due to human activity and its relationship to technology. In the exhibition, an ice rock gradually melts. The droplets, like a ticking clock, serve as a memento mori that point to an inescapable reality and our responsibility in this interconnected world to address these environmental threats.

1. “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water.” in Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivitiesin Feminist Thought and Practice, eds. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny Söderbäck. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

text by Anaïs Lerendu, images Rob Harris.

Hannah Rowan, Prima Materia, 2019.
10 May - 15 June
solo exhibition at Assembly Point, London. supported by Arts Council England.

Prima Materia is an installation of interconnecting systems that speculate on the origins and many shifting states of water.

The exhibition takes its name from a formless primeval substance, regarded in alchemy as the first matter and the ubiquitous starting material of the universe. This new body of work will continue the artist’s exploration into the relationships between fluidity, ephemerality, geology and technology.

Constructed ecologies will circulate and weave together, time will flow through materials in various states of becoming and entropy; ice melting, water flowing, iron rusting and salt crystals forming. Cosmological and organic entities will move through material states and multiple timescales.

Sixty to ninety percent of your bodily matter is composed of water. Water, in this sense, is an entity, individualized as that relatively stable thing you call your body. But water has other logics, other patternings and means of buoying our earthly world, too. Not least, water is a conduit and mode of connection. Just as oceanic currents convey the sun’s warmth, schools of fish, and islands of degraded plastic from one planetary sea to another, our watery bodies serve as material media. In an evolutionary sense, living bodies are necessary for the proliferation of what scientists Mark and Dianna McMenamin call Hypersea, which arose when life moved out of marine waters and by necessity folded a watery habitat “back inside of itself.” Today, when you or I drink a glass of water, we amplify this Hypersea, as we sustain our existence through other “webs of physical intimacy and fluid exchange.” In this act of ingestion, we come into contact with all of our companion species that inhabit the watershed from which that water was drawn—book lice, swamp cabbage, freshwater mussel. But we connect with the sedimentation tanks, and rapid-mix flocculators that make that water drinkable, and the reservoir, and the rainclouds, too. Hypersea extends to include not only terrestrial flora and fauna, but also technological, meteorological, and geophysical bodies of water.

Astrida Neimanis Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water

Hannah Rowan’s work explores an ephemeral chain of events unfolding through material states: transformation, growth, reaction, adaptation, evolution and degradation. Both her work and her studio rarely look the same on any given day. The artist works on assemblages by adding together various elements and then returning the next day – extracting or refining details, building up and taking away or vice versa. In many cases, she works with the limits of her own body – how high she can reach, how much she can lift or stretch. 

With the noteworthy interconnections between her elemental and ritualistic materials, these being both inanimate and living organisms, Rowan’s work reflects upon an essence of time in which the relationships between different materials act upon or support each other. As she explains, “I am interested in working with a wide array of materials and forming intricate connections and assemblages with these elements through a fluid process. Often water plays a role in relation to the material states of these components”. 

Rowan finds deep relationships between elements that are often considered inanimate, but in fact just operate on different timescales. Coupled with her stage-like approach, enhanced by lighting devices, magnifying glasses and kinetic utensils, it’s an entangled scenario that enacts the potential for change to occur, creating circumstances in which growth and entropy unravel. The works exude a subtle brutality and observed violence through their detached, clinical presentation. This forensic stance reflects a wider sense of anxiety with regard to global and cosmological events taking place in real time, such as climate change, the liquidity of data and the acceleration of technology. Taking a closer look at her work, one begins to find one’s own connections between time, matter, ecology and geology, as well as medicine, science-fiction, forensic science, alchemy and astrology.
Vanessa Murrell, co-founder of DATEAGLE ART

exhibition photography by Ben Westoby

Prima Materia Publication, please email to request a copy directly

HANNAH ROWAN - Chrysalis, 2021, Galerie Sébastien Bertrand

The Chrysalis, a crystal dissolving into liquid, a being suspended between two forms, neither one nor the other, catalysed transformation.

Water, continually returning and becoming, dispersing, collecting, channelling, moving from intimate raindrops to vast oceans, holding ancient frozen knowledge, melting into tides of erosion and rebirth.

Glass vessels suspended from the gallery ceiling cocoon melting ice. Inspired by porous aquatic creatures, glacial ice and the notion of the butterfly chrysalis as a moment of material transformation and becoming. Exploring the inverse properties of molten glass that cools to form an amorphous solid and ice that melts to form a liquid, these vessels embody flowing states of matter. As the ice melts, beads of condensation form on the surface of the glass and fall into a copper puddle; water saturates salt crystals and congeals, evaporates and begins the cycle anew.

Hannah Rowan’s sculptures evoke fragility, transience, transformation and loss in relation to bodies of water and wider ecological and geological systems. Using materials that trace the passing of time to transmute into other forms, blurring boundaries between phases of matter, the sculptures will evolve throughout the exhibition, merging the tangibility of sculpture with the ephemerality of melting ice.

These sculptures emerge from Rowan’s time documenting melting glaciers in the Arctic and continue her exploration of working with materials that embody flowing states; melting ice, molten glass, crystallising salt and oxidising copper. The traces of water are present in the evolving and shifting materials used, allowing for the vibrancy of their matter to animate the passing of time across their surface.

Hannah Rowan, The Well (living waters), 2022, hand blown glass, cast ice, welded steel, bentonite clay, salt.

Exhibited alongside Vessels of Touch in group exhibition Still Waters Run Deep at Nieuw Dakota, Amsterdam, NL

Opening Sunday 26 June

Artists:
Phoebe Boswell
Deep Time Agency (Miriam Sentler & Wouter Osterholt)
Patrick Hough
Esther Kokmeijer
Kasia Molga
Hannah Rowan

Curator
Still Waters Run Deep is an initiative of and curated by Marlies Augustijn.

Funding & sponsorship
This project is supported by the Mondriaan Fund, the Prins Bernhard Culture Fund (Lente Fund), the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts), and BeamSystems.

Hannah Rowan
Vessels of Touch
2021
hand blown glass, cast bronze, hand spun copper, salt, ice, water, welded steel, aquatic plant

Hannah Rowan, Anatomy of Ice, 2020, single screen video.

The video ‘Anatomy of Ice’ is the documentation of a performance Rowan developed in Svalbard, in the Arctic Circle, just below the North Pole. The video combines land-based performance and underwater sound recordings, accompanied by a voiceover that merges personal narrative on touch, longing, distance and loss in relation to the melting ice in the Arctic. With a hydrophone submerged in the ocean, she was able to capture the loss of ancient air bubbles that once trapped in the ice became frozen archives of the Earth’s atmosphere. As the ice melts, these air bubbles escape, disperse into the atmosphere and their deep time memories disappear.

Part of an ongoing ephemeral and embodied research voyage into the Anatomy of Ice.

Alongside the original performance, this evolving project takes form as video, sound, text and performance readings.

Hannah Rowan
By The River
2021
hand blown glass, cast iron, welded steel, hand spun steel, water, pond plants

Hannah Rowan, Vessels of Touch 2, lost-wax cast bronze, hand blown glass, glazed ceramic with oxides, spun copper, salt crystals, water, welded steel

Hannah Rowan, Becoming Rhizome, 2022, ceramic, glazes, oxides, brass hooks.

Exhibited in Symbiocene at L’Ete des Serpents, Arles, FR.

Rhinoceros
Haarlem Artspace, Wirksworth
7th May - 5th June

A group exhibition exploring themes of land, excavation, history, material and alchemy.

Nathaniel Faulkner
Anna Hughes
Ian Jackson
Hannah Rowan
Jessica Wetherly

Curated by Kristian Day & David McLeavy

Hannah Rowan
A River is a Flowing Vessel
2021
glass, rain water, glazed ceramic, aquarium pump, timer plug, mister, silicone pipe, river glass, chain, hook

part of artist residency exhibition Exploring the Undefined at Taipei Artist Village

>LISTEN audio piece A River is a Flowing Vessel on Radio Arts Catalyst

During her residency at TAV, Rowan has been continuing her research around bodies of water and phases of matter. She has been interested in learning about Taiwan’s ecosystem; focusing on the mutualistic relationship between butterfly and plants, atmospheric conditions such as humidity and saturation, water as a living archive and submerged aquatic plants. Her work stages Butterfly Chrysalises in relation to molten and recycled glass as sites of material transformation and becoming. Focusing on the metamorphosis of the Chrysalis – the caterpillar quite literally dissolving into liquid, the living soup becomes as an analogy for systems of care, healing, hope and becoming. Inspired by Donna J. Haraway’s tentacular thinking and Ursula K Le Guin’s framing of the carrier bag as a vessel and a container to reflect on notions of repair and multi-species solidarity. Rowan’s research into bodies of water has involved thinking vertically between the river waters surface and the submerged in relation to the unique eco-system provided by the protection of mangroves roots, that inhabit the marginal space between the land and the sea. Rowan reflects on rivers as transitory vessels and stages water as a flowing archive; transmitter, container and the contained. Her work invites us to reflect on our presence as and with bodies of water. To slow down, engage and connect to wider ecological systems.

Hannah Rowan
Vessels I & II
2021
Blown glass, rainwater, rubber straps, carabiners

Exhibited in a Sculpture Garden for Brooke Bennington: Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer 5th Edition, (2021), Fulmer, United Kingdom

Photos: Rob Harris

glass, water, steel, mangrove seed pods

Seas Shaped by Asteroids (Vesta), 2019
cast bronze (form taken from 3D print of asteroid vesta)
20 x 16 x 19cm (bronze dims)

Hannah Rowan, Triple Point (Atacama), 2017. Performance with ice in the Atacama Desert,

Triple point is when the temperature and pressure at which a substance can exist in equilibrium in the liquid, solid and gaseous states. In this case, the Triple Point of Water.

This performance took place in the Atacama Desert, on the traditional Lands of the Atacameños.

WATER ATLAS (ATACAMA)
single Chanel video

The footage in this video was recorded while in the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth, where I began this project. This project will continue to grow and move as I expand Water Atlas into different environments. Water Atlas is a recent, expanding and still developing project that archives my encounters with the presence, absence and journeys of water to permeate and interconnect ecological and artificial cycles.

A series of Hannah Rowan’s Cyanotypes are now available via The Edit Gallery, Limassol, Cyprus.

During her time in Cyprus Rowan began developing a series of cyanotypes, an early form of camera-less photography, where light-sensitive chemicals are painted onto paper and exposed to the sunlight and rinsed with water. For ‘Tresses Vessels’ she positioned herself onto the painted vessels to capture the outline of her hair, flowing into the vessels, reminiscent of water, beams of light, or submerged root systems. For ‘Desert Vessels’, ‘Glacier Vessels’ and ‘Tidepool Vessels’ she combined cyanotype processes with large-scale transparent prints of her photographs from the Arctic, Atacama Desert and Cyprus. The material processes involved in making cyanotypes reflect Rowan’s ongoing interests in vessels, alchemy, ritual, and the animacy of matter.

Hannah Rowan, Melting Transmission, 2018, ice, water, PETG rock, glass tanks, posi print, welded steel, lights, clip clamp, 3D printed plaster powder rock, plaster fragments, rock salt, clear extruded acrylic tube, silicone tube, copper join, bricks, perspex.

Multi-media installation developed whilst artist in residence for the ‘Outdoor School’ at the Banff Centre, Canada, Summer 2018.

Water circulates around an array of assembled materials and components. materials include ice, clay, sieve, glass tank, PVC tubes, pumps, lights, copper pipes, aluminium casts of salt crystals, bronze casts of twigs, digital prints on transparency film, 3D printed rock.

Hannah Rowan, Melting NaCl (Horizontal), 2018, rubber bungee cord, ice screw, ice, rock salt, glass, welded steel, concrete cores, magnifying glass

Hannah Rowan & SHELL LIKE at Well Projects

Featuring sound works by Alex Borkowski, Leyla Pillai & Madeleine Stack.

19 April - 5 May 2019

I’M IN THE BATH ON ALL FOURS is a 3-phase visual art exhibition and interspersed series of talks, performances, workshops and screenings curated by Well Projects and artist Flora Parrott. Its premise stems from a research trip, undertaken by Flora Parrott, to learn about a recently discovered cave dwelling fish, the Cave Loach, that inhabits a labyrinthine cave network. In each phase of ‘I’m in the bath on all fours’ a pair of artists, artist-groups or researchers are invited to collaborate and expand upon notions of the sub-aqueous, engaging with the nature of water, embodied experience and the deep dark in relation to community and commonality.

Through technological apparatus and neoprene skin, a descent into the water necessitates a restructuring of the senses… You are always touched and touching the liquid volume, a three hour long slime hard squeeze marks a stuttered path down through twenty thousand years - further into the subaqueous towards a phenomenology of immersion and deep time… The work of Hannah Rowan and SHELL LIKE come together in these deep watery spaces.

A halo of artificial light, regulators and tubes... An image of a diver, slung with decompression cylinders as they slide through gaps in prehistoric rock, comes into sharp focus when considering Hannah Rowans work; which explores the frictions between the slow geological time of natural process and the frenetic and technology driven activity of humans. Synthetic and organic elements enmeshed in circulatory systems of flowing water and tubes provide a series of interconnected biomes in which material relationships are animated or begin to crystalize. These changes in material states allude to the delicate nature of ecological balance, questioning relationships between the human & the non human.

Punctuated by the soft crackle of underwater sonic space and modulated by both the fleshy and the technological; the sound baths presented by SHELL LIKE - featuring works by Alex Borkowski, Leyla Pillai and Madeleine Stack - flow through the gallery. This trilogy of slippery narratives guides the listener, sharpening their ears to achieve a trance-like state, pulling them by wet hair into a lake - hands circling lilac bath waters - as the conditions for life are rebuilt. Encircling words and their sonic counterparts imagine bodies which stand with one foot in an organic puddle, the other in a synthetic slipstream.

In these audio works  - as in the work of Hannah Rowan - geological time, the synthetic and the organic converge in deep bodies of water.

I’M IN THE BATH ON ALL FOURS, is kindly supported using public funding from Arts Council England.

 Text Well Projects Images Rosy Carr

Becoming Lithocene (2019) curated by Diana Hierbet at Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

Tsēmā Igharas / Suzanne Nacha / Meghan Price / Hannah Rowan 

Becoming Lithocene pulls from the language of speculative storytelling and glacial geology to approach the actual and imagined relationships between ice and rocks present in this exhibition. Lithocene, a term coined by contemporary medievalist and environmental humanist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, is used in this exhibition as an imaginative proposition to describe a longer view of lithic lifespans, and their ability to link and transcend human epochs. As theorist Lowell Duckert writes in his 2013 essay, Glacier, “to study a glacier is always to study its work. A glacier is always-already acting, and its work is never done.” [1]  Speaking to the unfixed state of the geologic, the works in Becoming Lithocene serve as explorations of vast geologic time, while also pointing to questions of memory and place via the geological relationship between these two materials. 

The assembled works serve as an invitation to rethink the temporal structures that appear to ground cultures and geographies. Ice is creaturely and ephemeral, destabilizing and depositing rocks before it disappears. Forming rafts that suspend, displace, and transport, it is responsible for the movement of pebbles, boulders, and mountain ranges. In the context of this exhibition, such partnerships between ice and rock are observed through the geologic movement of the glacial erratic—a rock deposited by glacial ice non-local to its area—that is referenced in three works by Meghan Price. Small diorama-like boxes contain stones enmeshed in metal netting. Released from their environment, some seem tenuously held in an abstracted landscape, while others appear to have moved at a quicker rate. Works by Price and collaborator Suzanne Nacha draw attention to the unfixed state of glacial erratics by making impressions of their surfaces and flying them as kites; a floating topography of past or future geographies. 

Tsēmā Igharas’ sculptural photographs depict black and green obsidian, traditionally mined by Tahltan First Nation from the volcanic complex Mount Edziza in what is now known as northwestern British Columbia. Familiarly known as Ice Mountain for its prominent ice-filled caldera which creates its own weather systems, the mined obsidian from Mount Edziza in Igharas’ work evinces its geological history as well as a culturally grounded understanding of the material. As a form of volcanic glass created by fissures or erupting volcanos that cool in water present on the mountain, obsidian also reflects a particular geological relationship between rock and ice in liquid form. The artist’s choice to install these works of proxy obsidian on the ground speaks to their past lives rooted to the Mount Edziza region, as well as the Tahltan connection to the land. 

Hannah Rowan draws attention to the individual physical properties of copper, plastic, ice, and their imbued material histories that work to reposition the anthropocentric binary between human and nonhuman. These sculptural installations could be understood as cumulative in a temporal and physical sense: instead of sediment, active layers such as the movement of melting ice; the formation of salt crystals; and water piped to and from a tank, reflect the artist’s interest in visualizing ‘a continual state of becoming’.[2]

This exhibition’s reference to the Lithocene represents an effort to look back as well as forward, to destabilize anthropocentrism, and to partner with forces outside of human experience. In storying fluid interactions between ice and rocks, each work in Becoming Lithocene calls attention to the ways in which nonhuman and human lives will continue to overlap and shape one another. 

Curated by Diana Hiebert, Curatorial Research Practicum at Walter Phillips Gallery.

[1] Lowell Duckert, “Glacier,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 71. doi:10.1057/pmed.2012.41.
[2] Hannah Rowan, in conversation with the curator, 2018.

text by Diana Hierbet and Photography by Nahanni McKay. 

Oikos Logos

a collaboration between Hannah Rowan, Matthew Verdon and Gregory Herbert. Curated by William Clarke at Enclave Lab, Nov 2018.

The term ecology derives itself from the Greek words Oikos (household) and Logos (study), translating as ‘the study of the household’. Oikos Logos has activated Enclave Lab as a festivalistic laboratory departing from the traditional static exhibition structure and instead favouring real-time testing of theory with practice in a residency environment. The festivalistic Laboratory, as a curatorial methodology, is alternative to spectacle by encouraging participation and play to create edutainment value whilst promoting non-violence towards all living things through self-management, coexistence and co- survival. Split into two parts, Enclave Lab has first become a laboratory, in which the artists have taken residence for the past 3 weeks, and secondly an exhibition space where there aren’t singular works, but instead a mapping of an idea.

Jacob Von Uexküll, the father of modern zoology, proposed the term umwelt to describe his findings of closed worlds overlaid on the Earth. His dehumanization of nature combined with the studying of what Anna Tsing would call ‘polyphonic assemblages’ in an ecological community of multi-specie worlds, birthed a radical reconfiguring of Darwinian hierarchies that were then thought to be the natural order. Tsing and Donna Haraway, have furthered Uexküll’s thinking to try and form an ecological postanthropocentric position that has roots within the arts, politics and the social, considering the term Anthropocene as inadequate when addressing the Earth as a shared space of all organisms. Anna Tsing, an American anthropologist, questions in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015) at what point does a ‘gathering become a happening’ when species act upon each other drawing “one world making project into the other”. We are aware that multispecies alliances already occur without humans in the symbiosis of the Earth and we are now learning how to be included in this, sewing together our stories to the Earths. Another of Tsing’s notions is that of a ‘contamination as collaboration’. Can human contamination of the Earth’s environments, ecologies and creatures evolve into some form of collaboration? How does the non-human interact with other others? How do we articulate and narrate the nonhuman ‘other,’ through what language, and in what setting?

Human influenced ecologies can create new environmental networks by mutualisticly transferring material; we provide technological assistance to coral growth so they can reproduce faster to combat human caused coral bleaching, providing a life source for many of the oceans creatures. We could think of humans as becoming a fluid component of the Earth’s mesh, even if we aren’t necessary to its survival; we are a node, a paranode and a communication link. The strange stranger, which Timothy Morton suggests is an uncanny ‘arrivant’ in a space where no one is sure who is who or what is what highlights the interconnectedness of this mesh. It is a blended ecotone, where two ecologies meet and all life forms act upon each other, rendering it difficult to distinguish one from another. The mesh, Morton suggests, is a more suitable word to describe natural networks as they are beyond concept as something that can be both the holes in a network and the threading between them.

Text by William Clark, images Jedrek Filus, Nov 2018

Materials List

 Activated carbon pellets

Activated growing substrate

Air stones

Aquarium heaters

Biodegradable Carbon

Bottles, glass

Bottles, plastic

Bricks with seaweed, River Thames

Bucket

Bungee cord

Burette stands

Cable ties

Canned plant growth CO2 & applicator

Clamp clips

Clamps, bar

Clamps, C

Clamps, G

Compost

Cooler boxes

Crates

Culture, Chlorella

Culture, Spirulina

Digital thermometers

Drawer divider

Electrical cables

Fish bowls

Flexible hoses

Floral foam bricks

Food containers

Funnel

Geotextile

Green tea

Growbulbs

Growth medium

Hemp rope

Humidifier

Jars, glass

Jars, plastic

Laboratory flask

Lights, aquarium

Lights, clamp

Lights, clip

Lights, growlight

Magnifying glass

Magnifying glass with alligator clips

Mesh bags

Moss balls

Moss, Deptford Creek

Moss, River Thames

Mud, Deptford Creek

Mud, River Thames

Mudlarking finds, River Thames, bones

Mudlarking finds, River Thames, ceramic fragments

Mudlarking finds, River Thames, glass fragments

Mudlarking finds, River Thames, log

Mudlarking finds, River Thames, rusted nails

Mudlarking finds, River Thames, smoking pipe fragments

Network Diagram, Paul Baran’s

Plants, pet store

Plants, Deptford Creek

Plants, River Thames

Plexiglass

Pumps, air

Pumps, water

Rocks, River Thames

Rod

Seaweed iodine supplements

Sticks

Storage boxes

Timer switches

Trays

Tressles

Underground access chamber base with fixed inlets

Underground bottle gully

Underground drainage socket bends

USA - UK plug adapter

Vase

Water, Deptford Creek

Water, River Thames

Water, tap

Wheatgrass

Xanthoria parietina, Maritime Sunburst lichen

Lonely Tree, 2018, twig, copper rod, aligator clip, digital print on silk, copperized rock, limestone slab

Hannah Rowan, Melting Evaporating, 2017,

Exhibited in Creekside Open at APT Gallery, London

Hannah Rowan, Melting NaCl (Vertical), 2018, rubber bungee corD, ice screw, ice, welded steel, meat hook, 3D printed plaster powder rock, glass tank, rock salt, light.

Exhibited as part of Too Much Information (RCA Sculpture) at Seventeen Gallery, London, UK

Hannah Rowan, Shifts, 2017

Hannah Rowan, Shifts II, 2017

Hannah Rowan, Aquarium I, 2018

Exhibited at Yours mine and Ours Gallery for The Roger Ailes Memorial Show: Fair and Balanced

http://yoursmineandoursgallery.com/rams/

Hannah Rowan, Desk, 2017

Hannah Rowan, Wind Over Water (Blue Screen), 2018

Hannah Rowan, Paravant, 2016

Hannah Rowan, Screen Tides, 2016