Carl Rowe

My art switches back and forth between an engagement with socio-political issues and subconscious renderings. I can’t escape my concern for the wrongdoing in the world and within my art a surface layer of humour, absurdity and the arcane masks a strong undercurrent of concern for humanity. When I ease off the direct engagement with current affairs, symbols, objects and graphic devices float up from somewhere in my memory and arrange themselves in unlikely compositions.

I work with both paint and print process. The materials that I use are often intrinsically connected with the images they portray such as the work Drool, an installation made with ink containing herbs and spices from the G20 countries and the Serbian paprika used in Deprecated Location, a screen print depicting Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Recent paintings, drawings and prints present an obsession with clay pipe fragments, hazard warnings, cylindrical containers and clouds of particulates.