Industrial landscapes provide the inspiration for abstract artist Day Bowman, writes Sarah Mayhew Craddock

There is an aerial aesthetic to Day Bowman’s large, abstract, expressionist paintings currently on display at Art Jericho as part of a solo exhibition, Alchemy. Vast swathes of contrasting colours meet, as if soaring high over Middle Eastern coastlines. Electric oranges and yellows smattered with dark, geometric ports bite into the sandy shades and spill out into the blue. Only that is not what Bowman’s works portray; they are more abstract than that.

Bowman grew up beside the Bristol Channel in the coastal town of Minehead in Somerset in the 50s and 60s. The long days of her liberated childhood were spent exploring the fascinating, masculine, detritus of post-industrial wastelands with her brother.

Minehead ‘enjoys’ a temperate climate, warmer and wetter than most other places in the UK, and it also experiences one of the highest tidal ranges in the world (often as great as 14.5m).

This is a landscape of juxtapositions, which might explain the jarring recurring motifs of exotic flowers and tubular shapes that recur throughout Bowman’s work in her exhibition at Art Jericho.

It would appear that Bowman has written her own alphabet and language of painting born out of the landscape of her childhood — a language that describes the physical fringes of society or town planning.

The work in Alchemy alludes to the no-man’s land on the outskirts of town that is either deserted, punctured with metal and concrete memories of a past life, quietly awaiting a new future, or occupied by a few men (more frequently than not) in high-vis jackets by day, becoming a desolate land of high fences, razor wire, cranes, diggers, rubble and towering gasometers by night.

The work feels as though it is at once a lament and a celebration.

Bowman remarks: “There is a kind of cruel beauty in the destruction we create — for me, the oil depot, stacked piping and overhead cables have superseded the rivers and hills of the traditional picturesque.”

This recent body of work, and the immediacy of the Fast Moving Trains studies suggest that such landscapes clearly continue to excite, inspire and inform Bowman in her approach to her artistic practice.

There are also glimpses of possible references to other artists that may have influenced the development of Bowman’s oeuvre, namely Anselm Kiefer’s dark, monumental mark-making and the claggy allusions to oil slicks and curved shapes of Richard Serra’s sheet metal assemblies and compositions.

Bowman’s work varies in scale and media, from quickly executed and intimate small-scale charcoal studies on paper, to carefully crafted collage, to large-scale, heavily worked paintings on canvas like the one hanging in Branca, in Walton Street. In addition to the recurring motifs pulling the entire body of work together, there is also a rhythm that unites the works.

Describing Bowman’s work, Jenny Blyth of Art Jericho says: “Perfected over years, Day creates abstract expressionist paintings that feel like jazz fusion. Her paintings are charged and fluid — dynamic in form and joyous in palette.”

There is a sense of greater environmental and political concepts at play in this exhibition, which may explain the Middle-Eastern reference that I felt so vividly when stood before Bowman’s works.

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While it is difficult to deny the free and easy exaltation in the depression, there is a definite tension in Alchemy. Spending time among these works in Art Jericho, my mind could not help but drift to contemporary news items about the future of crude oil and petrochemicals.

The rhythm and sense of movement captured in Bowman’s works — when combined with the collaged maps and birds in the Weymouth/Portland series and the global leaps from UK to Middle-Eastern ports — evoke an almost overwhelming sense of transience and transmigration.

Therefore, it is unsurprising to learn that Bowman has previously collaborated with the improvisational jazz composer Steve Harris and, more recently, the multi-national music group TransGlobal Underground as part of The Urban Wastelands Project. It is exciting to hear that several members of TransGlobal Underground are due to perform in Art Jericho surrounded by Bowman’s multi-dimensional, dynamic work before the exhibition closes on February 8.

Bowman will be giving a talk at Art Jericho this Saturday at 3pm. All are welcome and admission is free.

Day Bowman, Alchemy
* Art Jericho, Oxford
* Wed-Sun 12pm-6pm, until February 8
* Admission free
* www.daybowman.com