Artist’s Statement
In Posy Jowett’s practice, she challenges assumptions about drawing – often making ephemeral, temporal artworks where a ‘drawing’ can manifest as needlework, musical notation, writing or speaking. Currently Jowett is working on a body of work where she uses thistledown – the nearly weightless, soft, spindly seeds which thistles disperse at this time of year – as a means of recording movement, speech and breath.
Influenced by Dr Masaru Emoto, the Japanese scientist who showed that spoken words can affect the shape water molecules make when they freeze, Jowett writes poetry which is spoken to the thistledown, causing it to dispel in the exhibition space and create patterns.(1) The work encourages the audience to viscerally engage with the resulting drawing, which reminds them of their physical bodies as they move around and, in turn, alter the drawing.
Thistledown, in Jowett’s work, is a not only an instrument to record the Apollonian world of the senses, of sound or movement, but also a means of exposing the intangible, the unknowable or the illogical as they move or sway of their own accord – the Dionysian sublime.(2) Nietzsche’s opposing but complementary forces of the Apollonian and Dionysian dialectic are epitomised by thistledown, which is indescribably soft and beautiful, especially in comparison to the aggressive spikes of the thistle from which they are formed.
Intrigued by dualities, dichotomies and juxtapositions, Jowett brings together fundamental oppositions in her work, questioning the world that we see and understand, and referring to the necessary contradictions between the scientific and rigid; and the fragile, beautiful and evanescent.
P o s y J o w e t t 