Dictionary and Reference Book Drawings

The Dictionary Drawings began with a cache of old dictionaries Bowen found when cleaning out her parents home. She  was intrigued by their beautiful and plentiful engravings. Her interest in the collision of abstraction and representation led her to create this series which upends the way that dictionaries are traditionally experienced. She posits new visual rules to organize the dictionaries. For instance she might paint the nouns blue, the verbs red and so on. She forces new associations onto the groupings of existing words.  She sometimes highlights particular words to make evocative poetic phrases that emerge from the visual field. Decorative elements or patterns create a beautiful visual distraction over and around the texts. Sometimes the collages point at the censorship of words in our current political situation. Actual dictionaries have fallen out of favor in the age of google. These collages acknowledge their disappearance while offering a site for projection, a mysterious addition to our rapidly changing material world.