Anne Howeson March 10th, 2023

Anne Howeson is an artist, and was for many years a tutor at the Royal College of Art.

After studying at the RCA she worked commercially with publishing and editorial clients from the UK and America, Europe and Canada, but now focuses on self-initiated drawing exhibitions.

Recent projects have included the regeneration of Kings Cross and narrative exchanges with imagery from print and photography archives looking at time and memory.

If you would like to get touch with Anne Howeson, please email her at:

anne@aehoweson.com

Anne Howeson Statement March 7th, 2023

What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present. T.S Eliot Burnt Norton

The drawings of Anne Howeson are concerned with time, memory and narrative. They capture a contemporary sense of anxiety, melancholy and uncertainty that is both ancient and very modern. Howeson integrates art historical references, ideas, chance associations and memories, instilling the works with a timeless quality.

In previous work, the idea of place was central. More recently, working in response to print and photographic archives, there has been a growing focus on storytelling. Found imagery becomes a setting for chance encounters between people, objects and places, a form of visual poem or short story where layers of distant and recent memories are seen as separate but simultaneous – like a palimpsest.

The quiet stillness of Piero della Francesca, the humanity and everydayness of Giotto, Carpaccio, Fra Angelico and William Blake are major influences. The poetic and narrative voice in the films of Tarkovsky, Kentridge and Glazer are important and the power of place, loss, relationships and the passing of time in work by Edward Hopper, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and WG Sebald.

While making the drawings, the paper surface of the original image might be covered with a single painted colour (to create a specific atmosphere or sense of time). Once dry it is repeatedly drawn into with conte and crayon, worked, re worked, scratched and rubbed, at times becoming a back drop for themes of mortality, time, dystopia – at other times a stage set for the domestic and ordinary fragments of Howeson’s own life.

Since 2015 her work has been increasingly concerned with photography as a source. There’s a mystery, an alchemy in the idea of turning one image into another one, which is related but distinct, set apart with new meaning. The photograph unlocks ideas intuitively; perhaps a buried obsession, a meeting between the sacred, the historical and the political or a collision between the past and present. In some drawings traces of the original photograph remain, in others it almost disappears. The important thing is the effect the photograph has on the imagination, whether triggered by an incidental subjective detail (as in Roland Barthes’ Punctum) a powerful atmosphere, or an association sparked by personal memories.

Anne Howeson Biography March 4th, 2023

Anne Howeson lives between London, Cornwall UK and Fontecchio, Italy. She completed her MA at the Royal College of Art in London where she was a tutor between 1985 and 2022, promoting drawing as process, outcome and way of thinking.

Anne Howeson is a Jerwood Drawing Prize winner.

Solo Exhibitions:

“Feet of Angels”, Carey Blyth Fine Art, Oxford, March 18 -April 29 2023; “Present in the Past”, Collyer Bristow, London (2015); “Imagining King’s Cross”, Cross Street Gallery; London, UK (2015); “Remember Me”, The Guardian News and Media, London, UK (2009).

Group exhibitions:

These include: ING Discerning Eye, (2020, 2016, 2011); “Motive/Motif “V&A East (2019); Bunka Gukuen University, Tokyo (2019); Buckingham Palace (2018); “Ruskin Prize”, Millennium Gallery Sheffield, (2017).

Work in Public Collections:

The Museum of London

The Guardian News and Media

St George’s Hospital London

Imperial College London

Feet of Angels March 1st, 2023

I am exhibiting “Feet of Angels” at the Carey Blyth Gallery in Oxford, 18 March to 29 April 2023. This is a new body of work responding to the photography of William Henry Fox Talbot accompanied by drawings from recent years that follow through from my last exhibition “Present in the Past” in which I explored the transformation of Kings Cross over 300 years.

I first discovered Fox Talbot photographs as a schoolgirl, drawn by their striking sense of place and a fascination with the stiff 19th century figures of the long dead family and servants living on the Lacock estate, dressed so strangely, yet somehow intimate and alive.

Working with them recently, I’ve chosen images that offer settings for a new cast of characters using sources found variously in the search files of ’seated women’ and ’standing men’ in the Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné archive, from a painting or film (the woman on a swing in Jean Renoir’s ‘A Day in the Country’) or from an article in a newspaper reporting on current events. In this way artists can hide behind the original image which becomes a springboard for something that excites and connects them with their own internal life.

Feet of Angels commentary by curator Jenny Blyth

Invitation no 3 pdf copy1024_1 Press Release 'Feet of Angels' Anne Howeson at CBG March April 2023 (1)

John Ruskin Prize 2017 shortlist June 4th, 2017

I’ve been shortlisted for the Ruskin Prize 2017, with a stop frame ‘moving drawing’ called Regeneration and Revival at King’s Cross. This drawing, Midland Line Railway Works is the last image from the film. The original can be seen at my studio.

Imagining King’s Cross solo show September 13th, 2015

I’m having a solo drawing show. Imagining King’s Cross at Cross Street Gallery, Thursday September 17th until Thursday October 1st. See opening times above.
This is a transfer from my February show at Collyer Bristow Gallery, to a commercial gallery in Islington, with some new works. If you’d like a personal viewing or any further information please contact me via my website.

INVITE Cross Street gallery Anne Howeson invite

Press Release for Present in the Past January 18th, 2015

Present in the Past: Renovation and Revival in King’s Cross Central

Weekdays between 5 – 25 February 2015
Viewings by appointment, details below.
Collyer Bristow 4 Bedford Row London WC1R 4TF

Artist’s Talk with Archivist from L.M.A Archives:
Tuesday, 10 Feb 6 – 8pm: Present in the Past: working with archival images towards new creative projects.
Followed by Drinks in the gallery – a further chance to view the works.
Jerwood Drawing Prize winner and Royal College of Art lecturer Anne Howeson’s solo exhibition of 30 drawings turns King’s Cross/St Pancras (the largest area of urban redevelopment in Europe) into a palimpsest. Places and fragments are appropriated from imagery hidden in London print archives – including the London Metropolitan Archives, Museum of London and the Foundling Museum – and subverted in scale, context and content.

The digitally reprinted images are rubbed out and re drawn, becoming new works evoking a sense of passing time through a mixture of memory and invention. The unbuilt places of the future and disappeared buildings from the past are imagined and revisited. Part document, part fiction, the work presents architectural regeneration as inevitable, while considering its effect on the environment and communities of today. Appointments to view can be arranged by calling +44 (0)20 7242 7363

For further information please email gallery@collyerbristow.com
For high resolution images contact Anne Howeson: anne.howeson@rca.ac.uk +44 07807 676 499

Anne Howeson is a Jerwood Drawing Prize winner and lecturer at the Royal College of Art. She works on self-initiated drawing projects, including the solo exhibition ‘Remember Me’, at the Guardian News Media October 2009. She is an exhibitor in the 2014 Derwent Art prize and National Open Art Award and was an invited artist in the 2011 Discerning Eye show at Mall Gallery. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of London.

Collyer Bristow LLP is a firm of solicitors with 30 partners and some 140 staff, who provide a full range of legal services to a wide range of businesses and private individuals. It is ranked in both Chambers and the Legal 500 directories. The firm is passionate about the contemporary arts. It supports and promotes young artists through its in-house art gallery. The current exhibition at the Collyer Bristow Gallery can be viewed atwww.collyerbristow.com. The Collyer Bristow Gallery is a bespoke gallery space with a dynamic exhibition programme. Within the legal world, Collyer Bristow has been championing emerging talent in contemporary art for nearly twenty years. For further information please emailgallery@collyerbristow.com. @CBGallery1 #presentinthepast