Biography

Irish artist Pauline Rowan explores sanctuary, as well as home, through landscapes, settlements and our underpinned relationships with belonging and abandonment. With a background in Fine Art, her predominately lens based works incorporate documentary as well as collaborative and performative elements. Rowan is interested in layers of history in place, family and society, systems of defensive and offensive tactics used upon land, home and ritual. She recently graduated from Ulster University’s MFA in Photography with distinction.

Selected exhibitions:
Dissolving Histories, New Narratives, Curated by Paul Seawright & Peter Richards, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast

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For 18 months Rowan worked closely with a small community of people and their relationship to a de-consecrated convent and its’ abandoned gardens, all of which were marked for demolition. Her collaborators consisted of the convents’ transient residents and its’ previously evicted nuns. The project looks are our relationship to home, primarily the garden and our cultural repetition of the need to control land. It also considers the struggle and acceptance of those people involved, all knowing that their home and sanctuary would soon be destroyed. As a consequence a long standing, ancient link of the site with nature, worship and propagation was severed. This project has been created in time of Irish history when it is separating itself from catholic religion and redefining its relationship to spirituality.