CAMPLE LINE is delighted to present Time’s light, an exhibition of new and recent sculptures by Rowan Mace (b. 1961, Cornwall), opening 8 July 2023. Installed in our upstairs space, the exhibition will include new work, which Rowan suggests has ‘become a lot more painterly, slightly less architectural, and less hard-edged, softer…’

Time’s light builds upon Rowan’s recent solo exhibitions at Stallan-Brand in Glasgow and Zembla near Hawick (both 2021), and reflects a remarkably sustained investigation of structure, colour and light that encompasses rigour, balance and formal language alongside playfulness, intimacy and precarity. A newly commissioned short essay by writer Rhian Williams will accompany the exhibition.

Rowan has described her work as ‘painting that has become sculptural.’ She makes the structures first, using found and bought wood, before painting them. She has said: ‘The sculptures vary in content from a response to the wood in front of me and my desire to build structures that I have some sense of needing to make.’ Often Rowan makes the structures over winter, when she is not painting – constructing bricolages of block, line, angle and plane that vary between joyous verticality and more horizontal arrangements featuring unlikely cantilevers. They can be compact, with more solid elements that interlock closely, or more open and expansive, like elements holding together in the air.

The formal considerations of painting – speed, spontaneity, focus, oiliness, immediacy and sensuality – remain integral to Rowan’s work. She paints her structures ‘when the weather comes back and the light comes back,’ using oil paint, which she prefers for its luminosity and sensuality. She relies on bright daylight and the way it modulates colours: ‘The whole excitement is in the changing light, and the fact that I can’t see colour unless the light’s good.’ 

This exhibition is supported by Creative Scotland