Rowan Mace
Time’s light
8 July – 10 September 2023
Open Thurs-Sun, 11am-4pm
or by appointment outside of those times
Entry is free – all are welcome
The exhibition is wheelchair accessible
Coming Up
Sat 26 August, 4-5.30pm
Rowan Mace will be in conversation with writer and poet Rhian Williams
The event is free, but ticketed
About the exhibition
Images: (above) Rowan Mace, untitled, 2021, oil paint on wood, douglas fir, 86 x 21 x 11cm; (below) Studio, October 2022; Photos: Ocean Teale
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
About the artist
Watch the exhibition film that accompanies Time’s light at CAMPLE LINE. Featuring an interview with Rowan Mace recorded in her studio in June 2023.
Rowan Mace was born in Redruth, Cornwall in 1961. She undertook a foundation course at Falmouth School of Art where she discovered the work of modernist artists associated with St. Ives. She completed a degree in Fine Art at Leeds Polytechnic and moved to Glasgow in 1989.
Mace worked as an artist, exhibiting and teaching, until her first child was born in 1998. After a gap of about twelve years, she resumed her practice with her first exhibition at The Lillie Gallery in Milngavie. She has since exhibited in solo and group shows, including at Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art in 2015. In 2021 she had two solo shows, Still Orange at Stallan-Brand, Glasgow and Slow Yellow, Zembla Gallery, Hawick respectively. She was nominated for the Bryan Robertson Trust Award in 2021 and she has been nominated for a Paul Hamlyn Award in 2023.
Audio & Video
Audio Description
‘Untitled’ by Rowan Mace, described by Gallery Assistant Erin Fraser
Exhibition essay
Rowan Mace ‘Time’s light’ by Rhian Williams