Claire Cowie: "About Strange Lands: Sculpture and Works on Paper"

May 11, 2006—June 17, 2006 | Reception Thursday, May 11th, 6-8PM

James Harris Gallery is pleased to announce the third solo exhibition of watercolors and sculpture by Claire Cowie.  The body of work in this latest show, About Strange Lands: Sculpture and Watercolors,is inspired by the famous story of Clara, a rhinoceros who was raised by a Dutch sea captain and then exhibited in the 1740s and '50s to eager crowds of Europeans who had never seen the exotic animal

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"Meerkat Tree" 2006
"The Fence" 2006
"The Ruins" 2006
"Still Life" 2006
"The Ride" 2006
"Lost" 2006
"Cityscape/Broken Wall" 2006
"Rhinoceros" 2006

Claire Cowie

Claire Cowie uses a variety of media to reference the natural world around her home in Seattle, as well as around the world. Cowie utilizes symbols of the natural world such as birds, insects, and a variety of plant-life, as well as heavily using the negative space in a work. By using watercolor and ink in the areas around her subject Cowie references the fragmentation between the natural world and us, as well as of memory. The colors and shapes in her work create dream-like landscapes that pull in characteristics of urban architecture.

 Claire Cowie lives and works in Seattle, Washington, where she is a lecturer at the University of Washington. Cowie attended both the North Carolina School of the Arts (Winston-Salem, NC) and Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO). She received her MFA from the University of Washington (Seattle, WA). Cowie’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including shows at the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA), Takeda Biennial (Oaxaca, Mexico), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA), Shenzhen Art Institute (Shenzhen, China) and the Art Gym at Marylhurst University (Lake Oswego, OR). Her work is included in the collections of the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA), Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA), Safeco (Seattle, WA), and Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), among others.