James Harris Gallery | Claire Cowie: "Selvedge"

Claire Cowie: "Selvedge"

January 24, 2018—February 24, 2018 | Reception Thursday, January 4th, 6-8PM

James Harris Gallery is pleased to present our eighth solo exhibition with Seattle artist Claire Cowie. For this exhibition, the artist includes large-scale collaged paintings and mixed media sculpture. The title of the show is “Selvedge,” which refers to the self-finished edge on a woven fabric that prevents it from unraveling. Inspired by craft traditions such as quilt making, this show presents an evolution in Cowie’s collage practice and introduces unique materials in both her mixed media paintings and her sculptural works. In the past, Cowie’s signature style has included an attention to negative space and a muted palette. In this new work, Cowie has saturated her surfaces with imagery and color that provide little rest for the eye and an uncontainable exuberance that activates the gallery.

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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.