Pauline Rowan worked closely with a small community of people and their relationship to a deconsecrated convent and its’ abandoned gardens, all of which were marked for demolition, over a period of 18 months. Her collaborators consisted of the convents’ transient residents and its’ previously evicted nuns. The project looks at our relationship to home, primarily the garden and our cultural repetition of the need to control land. It also considers the struggle and acceptance of those people involved, all knowing that their home and sanctuary would be soon destroyed. As a consequence a long-standing, ancient link of the site with nature, worship and propagation was severed.
An extensive body of work, Under a Vaulted Sky, consists of portraits, still lives, and field documentary and is delicately intertwined with Rowans performative responses. This project has been created in an important time in Irish history, when it is separating itself from the catholic religion and finding its relationship to spirituality again. Rowan believes that while this system falls apart, the remnants of our pagan past can be seen emerging through the rubble.
There is something utterly bewitching about the way inside and outside collide in Rowan’s photographs. In one image, an arched church recess has become subsumed by rocks and dirt, and a cavernous hole in the wall is flanked by an intricate old floral mural. In another, the artist herself lies across a table and holds a branch at her stomach, as if it is a root growing from within her. Outside, statues have been left to decay and bleed blue onto their stones, while man-made fences are beginning to encroach into the space. Apples and statues, trees and breeze blocks, women and acts of worship – a whole constellation of signs and symbols, past and present, tumble together here. Joanna Creswell, Lens Culture
By fusing botanical and religious imagery, Under a Vaulted Sky suggests women’s bodies as just another space another outpost of patriarchy in general and Catholicism in particular…Women’s bodies are simply another thing to be measured and controlled. Life-giving, but by virtue of this quality, also threatening and in need of being curtailed. In its quiet documentation of a convent being slowly taken apart, Rowan’s series critiques the reality as given by Catholic dogma — in effect, by pointing to the artificial nature of the vaulted “sky” above, which has only ever served for the deleterious treatment of all that is capable of producing life, here on Earth. Rebecca O’ Dwyer, Irish Photo Network
Artist Bio: Pauline Rowan is an Irish visual artist who works predominately in photography. Works often explore the relationships between cultural, ritualistic symbolism and individual perceptions of reality. Her focus begins rooted in place and personal experience transforming through investigations and often personal vulnerabilities she conjures a phycological space and offers a new potentiality. Utilizing photography, participation, performative and material construction she endeavours to communicate her practices queries. Projects relate to ritual, motherhood, conflicting experiences of belonging and home.
Rowan was awarded an MFA in Photography with distinction from Ulster University in 2018/19. Nominated by PhotoIreland to FUTURES Photography & also selected by international jury to New Irish Works. Participated in Photo Musuem Ireland’s ‘In our Image: Photography & the Social Gaze’ .. ‘selected works (..) touch on the most pressing issues around Irish identity and history, coming to terms with the legacies of the past and the challenges of the future.
Images: 1. Pauline Rowan, Tabernacle under a Vaulted Sky, 2024, Image courtesy of the artist.
02. Pauline Rowan, Grandmother, 2024, Image courtesy of the artist.
03. Pauline Rowan, Maya Apples (on table) 2024, Image courtesy of the artist.
#UnderaVaultedSky www.paulinerowan.com
