Tony Bowen

I am a UK based artist with a background and first degree in painting but now working mainly with photography. Alongside formal and atmospheric considerations, my current work is largely inspired by the power of the trace, the fragment and the unresolved to provoke the imagination in unexpected ways. An enduring preoccupation with the found mark has led to material which observes, considers and documents banal and often overlooked surfaces in everyday life. Simple residues of human and other activity in domestic, natural and urban environments are of particular interest, not least for their potential to bring visual form to broader narratives. Whether literal or metaphorical, these enquiries open up new, personal ways of experiencing and deciphering various forms of landscape.

THRESHOLD is an ongoing photographic project: Responding primarily to thoughts about tensions between our private and public existences, these pieces document domestic windows in dense urban spaces – physical planes which connect the two. These liminal surfaces act as visual thresholds – sites of collision between anonymity and exposure. Balancing opposing needs for light and privacy, their uniformity is unremarkable by day, punctuated only occasionally by small signs of interior lives. Transformed by nightfall they become quiet beacons, emitting a soft glow charged with warmth, intrigue and ambiguity. Human presence is strangely signified by fields of saturated colour, elusive shadow and inexplicit form, hinting at what might lie beyond the veil. This work may prompt a broader meditation on the language and complexities of disclosure and concealment. It may also bring to mind the sublime allure of the mystery, the enigma and the intangible.

Untitled: Norfolk

Photographic print (archival pigment)

20cm x 25cm (40x40cm framed)

2022

£100