Jan Howlin is a Sydney-based sculptor whose politically conscious ceramics pack a wry punch, all the while demonstrating a deft and considered use of clay as a medium. Bending, flowing and undulating surfaces recur, alongside a predilection for etched lines, across her subject matter of bodies, land-forms and organic structures. Howlin’s formal interests carry and complicate the political charge of her work, binding conceptual urgency to aesthetic exploration.
A key question for Howlin is how we might imagine a climate-change-ready humanity. Early works took inspiration from the life of trees, with formations emphasising their manifestly collective existence: the supporting and merging of bulbous and cloud-like canopies. A further development was her series ‘in cactus’, that is, in paperclay built with the grooves and ridges of cacti, works whimsy into warning. Rendered in this cellulose simulacrum are her ‘cactus beings’, who stand on the other side of the adaptive leap necessary to live with climate change. Howlin’s lament through these figures is something akin to “If only we had a skin of cacti...” After all, the resilience of cacti to extreme heat lies in their very nature. In this way Howlin suggests the need for a closer attention to the adaptive and collective forms of nature as an essential task for art in time.
Howlin is less ponderous and more on the offensive in her 'Blokes' series caricaturing corporate greed. 'Blokes' gives form to a class of banal and bloated, suited and pathetic, blokes - now 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.
Jan Howlin trained at Sydney College of the Arts, where she was awarded a BFA (Hons) in 2007, and a MFA in Ceramics in 2011.
Cactus Chair Maquette, 2015, Ceramic and steel, 38 x 25 x 27 cm
