Lilah Fowler is a British-Japanese artist based in London, UK, creating sculptures and installations that explore transition, cultural hybridisaton, the movement between states of being, and the common, mutable languages that inform how we interpret our surroundings. Shifting from one representation to another, as things mutate, merge, or drift from their original context, Fowler’s work addresses the need to move between identities, spaces, cultures, or even between materials and forms. Throughout her work, labour intensive, hands-on processes and analogue methods meet and are woven through with the seemingly immaterial realm of digital imagery and data processing. Fowler’s wide-ranging practice incorporates weaving, ceramics, steel and resin sculpture, drawing, collage, moving image and sound. Between these media, Fowler asks us to consider the intimate politics of what happens in the movement between contexts and materials, what is gained or lost in the intricate translations and exchanges between cloth and clay, the actual and the virtual, from plastic to pixel. 

Developing bodies of work from long-term experimental and research-led investigations, Fowler’s intricate site-responsive installations and public projects often feature bold shapes and patterns, with striking colour contrasts. In Fowler’s work, abstraction is a tool to extract aspects of the world around us and to reconsider them in a new light. Her nth nature project, for example, emerged from a consideration of technology and the contemporary landscape as inherently combined. Drawing on bespoke software to generate patterns that reflected on the arbitrary nature of data collection, the project’s resulting series of installations attempted to capture the sense of space that is created by our emerging digital culture: the aesthetics of new power systems, and the visible and hidden infrastructures that underwrite our current technologies, and are interwoven into of the geopolitics of our hyper-landscape. Fowler’s work is deeply influenced by collaborations and conversations with researchers from other disciplines, recently working with biochemists to incorporate bio-technological research into artworks. Further research has extended into areas including the European renaming of plants worldwide, via the Linnaean classification system, including Japanese and Asian species. Fowler’s current work has shifted to more material expressions in clay, to works that use colour and form to explore the hidden and unspoken qualities of cultural hybridity, looking into how we each might navigate and translate among our own in-between spaces.

A research summary can be found at: iris.ucl.ac.uk

Lilah Fowler is represented by Galerie Gisela Clement, Germany.