Barbara Howey

My current body of work is paintings based on plants. Part of my process is photographing the species of plants seen on my daily walks, not rare but local, some native and some finding a space to grow where seeds have blown them from suburban gardens and wastelands. From ancient bluebell woods, woodlands due to be “developed”, field edges local marshes and roadside verges. The paintings are made rapidly wet into wet in an attempt to capture both the aliveness and vitality of the plants, and the fleeting moments of their precarious and endangered lives. Plants are extraordinary in that they provide the air we breathe and the food we eat and we are utterly dependant on them and yet we seem blind to this and continue to poison, pollute and deforest what once was abundant and diverse. Painting nature has a renewed relevance today in the light of climate change and biodiversity loss. My work references plants but also reimagines them through the process of gestural marks and heightened colour to create a space which slides between representation and abstraction and back again. Whilst the references are strongly related to the observable plant world the work is just as much about self-expression and the nature of painting itself.

Biography
Barbara Howey’s first degree was in painting at Leicester Polytechnic in 1991. She then studied for an MA in Feminism in the Visual Arts at Leeds University in 1992. She completed a practice-based PhD in 2001 at Norwich University of the Arts. She has shown Nationally and Internationally and has had work featured in The John Moores Painting Prize and Exeter Phoenix Open. She completed a 3-month International Residency in Norway at the Norsk Kunstnercentre, Dale in 2018. She also co-edited a volume of “Journal of Contemporary Painting” called “Commitment in Painting” in 2017 with Molly Thomson. In 2023 she co-curated a touring exhibition with Dr Judith Tucker called “Entwined – Plants in Contemporary Painting”. In 2025 the collaboration with the late Dr Tucker will result in a cross disciplinary exhibition at Groundwork Gallery called “Plant Power”.