Artist Talk: Dawn Lowndes

#WhollyFool Artist Talk | Dawn Lowndes

January, 2020

Marianne Chapel, Director of SPAACES, will be interviews #WhollyFool residency artist and solo exhibitionist, Dawn Lowndes. Visitors will be able to hear, first hand, about Lowndes artistic process. As well as how she conceptualized and conceived her latest installation, #WhollyFool. 

Dawn Lowndes splits her time between Western North Carolina and Richmond, Virginia. Her art work encompasses motifs of Identity and transformation, stemmed from historical accumulation and time specific context. She creates with the expectation of re-considering her own psycho-spiritual experiences. The process of creating her work is exceedingly important. She sees art as a making performance, where the final presentation turns out to be a visual document of the art experience itself. Her installations include the use of various mediums; paintings, sculptural elements, assemblages, and videos. Throughout her process she has no preference when it comes to materials or methods, and welcomes involuntary use of color as a form of her own subconscious expression. As she, the artist, transforms, her work transforms.

Wholly Fool is an installation that is cultivated over the course of Lowndes 31 day residency. She utilizes a  sculptural meditation space, which she created and implemented into SPAACES gallery. Within the space she does a meditative action daily to gather ideas, ephemera, paint, draw, write, and contemplate, to visually highlight things that speak to her. All these actions are done in response to her meditative process. The process honors her value of Art-as-Practice. Wholly Fool, is a temporal piece that unapologetically challenges object making and the resultant art consumption. Throughout the creative process she begins to see her work as a collective consciousness. The work created is a culmination of all of the past events, personal experiences, and emotions she has faced during the year of 2020. She begins to realize that the timeframe of her residency being at the end of the year was no accident. Her work displays emotions of anxiety, anger, and the power of endurance.