Timeline

Paul Bowen sculpts abstract compositions from scavenged quotidian objects. His eye for form exceeds our ordinary familiarity with his materials—discarded barn wood, embroidery hoops, or cable spools. He at times treats his material accumulations with paint, inlay, the application of tar, or a driven nail. Bowen will on occasion purchase materials for his work, such as old redwood boards from beer vats that he used for a commissioned sculpture at the Cape Museum of Fine Arts. The moniker of “found object artist” seems too confining for Bowen and he doesn’t feel that it describes him accurately. At the same time, he identifies closely with the history of objects and seeks to use them as symbols of their original purpose or their cultural origin, though they are unmistakably new and original objects that ask the viewer to question the materials themselves as they contemplate the new form.
Bowen often crafts his texture-driven work on a large scale, though not exclusively. He started as a painter at Newport College of Art in South Wales using tar and gesso for their textural, visceral effects in their application on sheets and tarps. Found objects played a role even in his earliest artistic pursuits. Upon sourcing his materials, be they harvested from sea, river, or junk pile, he likes to live with them and to “build a relationship” with them in order to explore and extrapolate their tactility. “It’s like a dance,” he says.
Bowen was born in 1951 in a small seaside town in Wales. Having grown up shortly after the Second World War in a family that used coal heat and had no refrigeration or telephone, he acquired a ‘waste not, want not' approach to objects. His father was an architect who very much enjoyed driving around the Welsh countryside with his wife and children once his stint of diffusing bombs during the war was over. Bowen’s sensibility reflects his childhood exploration.