Publications

Big Picture

By: Elliott Zooey Martin

Zooey Martin profiles the work of Rowena Dring.

Photography is the starting point of Rowena Dring’s landscapes. Seen from a distance, her works appear like paintings, but upon closer examination it becomes apparent that they are stitched fabric over canvas. The artist’s working method constantly runs between the mechanical and the digital. Dring digitally captures celebrated sites of Modernist myth and returns to the studio to adapt them with the aid of a computer programme. She then begins, in her words, “swapping cotton for paint”, reinterpreting the landscape with a sewing machine. With the highly abstracted and flattened images of her craft technique, Dring underscores the constructed character of those landscapes to demonstrate that these seemingly fresh views are always mediated by a cultural preconception. Dring mixes the traditional women’s work of embroidery and appliqué with the high art of painting, making sewn fabric landscapes stretched over canvas. Yet Dring does not view her work as “blurring the boundaries between art and craft” as much as “addressing the politics of representation”. Inspired by Andy Warhol’s paint-by-numbers series, Dring uses snapshots...

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