HANASAARI REQUIEM

SOLO SHOW
B-Galleria, Turku
13 – 29 September 2024

HANASAARI REQUIEM is the first solo exhibition of Lowe’s Structural Colour Paintings, presented at B-Galleria in Turku. The series was made with the last coal collected from the Hanasaari power station. The paintings consist of iridescent oil slick colours, which change in response to lighting conditions and reflections from the surrounding space. The work concerns itself with how changes occurring in the environment are intertwined with human fate.

The exhibition was supported by the Oskar Öflunds Stiftelse.

The Structural Colour Paintings were instigated by observing the closure of Hanasaari power plant from my studio window: witnessing the dwindling reflection of the coal mountain on the water’s surface. I was drawn to the oil slicks floating in Hanasaari Bay and the momentary glint of iron oxide in freshly cracked coal. The processes of energy and pollution draped in kaleidoscopic colours and shapes.


DURING TWO YEARS OF LABORATORY EXPERIMENTATION at the Academy of Fine Arts, I developed an alchemically-inspired process to manipulate my oil paints into mimicking this iridescence created by fossil fuel contamination. These rainbow colours are created by the bending of light — like in Newton’s prism — rather than from conventional pigments.


THIS IMMATERIAL COLOUR HAS THE ABILITY TO CHANGE in response to the viewer and the surrounding environment. The paintings are dependent on their viewer, bursting into colour as the observer moves past. Almost like living entities, they respond to the changing light, moving shadows, and reflected shapes and colours of a space. They reflect on the idea that nature is responding to human actions — and we in turn, are having to adapt ourselves to the changes happening in our environment.


SUCH LIVING ENTITIES REQUIRE A BODY. I simulate the presence of change through corporeal presence of the canvas. Using traditional priming methods to overtension the surfaces until they crackle into a fine lacework. Rubbing ground up coal grit or dust into the crevices. A landscape of scabs, scars and stretch marks. These marks make reference to how changes on a geological time scales and the timespan of art history, correspond with shorter human lives. The dry earth cracks open, an old master painting is covered in a craquelure webbing, almost imperceptible lines begin to form on skin. Time leaves its mark upon all bodies.


THE SERIES IS UNDERPINNED BY AN IDEA OF MATERIAL TRANSFORMATION. Oil and coal are made from fossilised bodies of millenia-dead plant and animal species. The carbon energy they contain is the energy of living bodies. The material of all life. After our death, nothing remains of us except ashes — carbon we return to this cycle. The reflective surfaces invite viewer to become a part of this moment of change. They touch upon themes of 'becoming' or metamorphosis that humans and all other entities and energy systems in nature ceaselessly repeat.