NAME: John Howes

PROFILE:

The rural environment is a significant source of inspiration for John Howes and making work with and from the very substance of a location is paramount within his work, whether as an intervention at a particular site or as site-derived works for exhibition elsewhere. His works tend to be quite formal in construction, reflecting a need for order and control, but with the compositional elements revealing dimensions and meaning latent within them.

For the last thirty years, Howes has lived on the Gwrhyd Mountain just northwest of Pontardawe in the upper Swansea Valley, South Wales combining a career as an artist, designer, farmer, lecturer and musician. This particular farm environment has been a ‘touchstone’ for his work. Through the daily and seasonal engagement with the materials, machinery, livestock and bureaucracy of farming, Howes creates works that bring together objects and words, map references and actual sites into a juxtaposition that gives them a mutually transformative influence touching upon aspects and issues surrounding language and tradition, environment and conservation, documentation and representation of agricultural landscape and culture.

CONTACT:

j.a.howes@talk21.com

www.johnhowes.co.uk