BIOGRAPHY
Lowe is a Helsinki-based emerging artist pushing the boundaries of colour exploration. She is graduating with a Masters from the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki (2023), and has a BA in Japan Studies from the University of Leeds, UK (2013). Her graduation project "the Structural Colour Paintings" exhibited at the MFA degree show ’23, received the prestigious Anita Snellman Award and had been shortlisted for the Global Design Graduate Show ’23.
As a member of the Bioart Society, Lowe merges painting with science and technology. Her laboratory-based process has earned her residencies in Finland, Berlin, and most recently Japan. Lowe is currently working on her first public commission, following success in the Hotel GLO Art Competition, where she claimed both first prize and the audience favourite award earlier this year.
ARTIST STATEMENT
What we have been, or now are, we shall not be tomorrow
― Ovid, Metamorphoses
I am looking for a new language of painting that reflects my experience of radically changing environment. I am interested in creating paintings that undergo transmutation in front of the viewer's eye – reacting to temperature or light stimuli. My work is guided by the idea of colours as bioindicators that revealing the invisible changes happening around us.
My current paintings are an attempt to replicate the iridescent oil slick that petroleum contamination exhibits in water. This rainbow-like colour is created by wavelengths of light, rather than by pigment. This alchemical process has demanded many nights in the materials science laboratory testing various alcohols and solvents.
These ‘living and dying paintings’ morph in response to light, shadows, and reflections from their environment. Colours wither away or spark into life in moments of metamorphosis. My work reflects on how nature’s cycles of transformations are ultimately intertwined with human impermanence.