“…all this tactile stuff that you could or would touch, that connects the painting to the end of your arm. Painting for the maker is not retinal; it is a full-body experience.”
— Amy Silman.
Arwen Flowers adopts a critical eye and an exploratory approach to interrogate our gestural relationship with surfaces. Flowers’ work, the use of materials and how she works with them are influenced by her lifetime experience with maintenance work. Drawn to materials that convey abject textures reminiscent of messiness and borrowed colour from her surroundings, Flowers attempts to examine the junctures between surface imperfections and gestural interruption through her practice. Paint records and dictates her gestures as she adds and removes material deposited in splashes, smears, puddles and sprinkles. Flowers questions notions of domestication, care and place. She develops a creative dialogue between material properties and herself as a maker through forms that emerge from her gestural interactions with media and substrates to express literal and metaphorical relationships between chaos and control.
During 2023-2024 Flowers undertaking a Master of Visual Arts at AUT, Auckland, New Zealand.
During 2023-2024 Flowers undertaking a Master of Visual Arts at AUT, Auckland, New Zealand.