Jan Howlin's practice in politically conscious ceramics packs a wry punch, all whilst demonstrating a deft and considered use of clay as a medium. Bending, flowing and undulating surfaces recur, along with a predilection for etched lines, across a body of work which ranges over bodies, landforms and organic structures. Howlin's formal interests carry and complicate the political charge of her work, binding conceptual urgency to aesthetic exploration.
Exemplary of Howlin's critical ceramics is her Blokes series where she caricatures corporate greed through her depiction of a class of banal and bloated, suited and pathetic blokes, in various poises of collusion. These blokes have no faces. Their features are thoroughly, uncannily, erased, so that their presence verges on ghoulish; an anonymity which renders those who possess as the truly possessed.
A key question for Howlin is how we might imagine a climate-change-ready humanity. Explorations in the forms of trees suggest a manifestly collective character to their existence, in the supporting and merging of bulbous, cloud-like canopies. A series 'in cactus' - or rather, forms built with the grooves and ridges of cacti - works whimsy into warning, with humanoid figures formed from this cellulose simulacrum. After all, the resilience of cacti to extreme heat lies in their very nature, and so, one might lament: "if only we were made of cacti…" These vegetal forms offer ample opportunity for her aesthetic explorations whilst at once speaking urgently; suggesting the need for a closer attention to the adaptive and collective forms of nature as an essential task for art in our time.
Trained at Sydney College of the Arts, Howlin was awarded a BFA (Hons) in 2007, and a MFA in Ceramics in 2011.
