PRESS RELEASE for MARKING OUT THE BOUNDARIES
AN ABBEY, A TUDOR MANOR HOUSE AND A DEPARTMENT STORE
It is difficult to see what Malmesbury Abbey, Athelhampton House and the Slade Centre have in common except, of course, all are located in the West Country. And, for this reason, during the autumn of 2026 – Spring 2027, all will provide a backdrop for Marking Out the Boundaries, a multi-dimensional project conceived by Day Bowman.
In her current body of work, Day was drawn to the shapes and the demarcation of fields and hedges in the English countryside, leading her to explore and question why the landscape is divided up in such ways.
Thanks to countless television programmes, holiday tour companies and painters waxing lyrical, she says, we have come accept this bucolic landscape of a patchwork quilt of shape and colour. But less than two hundred years ago the rural landscapes of Britain were largely open fields where villagers had rights of access and could graze a sheep or pig on the common lands.
The Enclosure Acts (1750 – 1820) put paid to all that with vast numbers of the peasant population moving off the land into the cities. The lives of working people changed irrevocably at this time and so, in turn, did the British rural landscape that was parcelled up, fenced and gated.
In this body of work, Day Bowman not only questions our perception of the British landscape but our understanding of property, of borders and of common rights.
MALMESBURY ABBEY: 10 – 28 September 2026. Dance Event Saturday 19 September 4.30pm.
As part of the Caerbladon Gallery September Festival, Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire will host a dance performance choreographed by Lizzi Kew Ross; the choreography will bring the notions of boundary making and marking into a physical language shared between all the performers. The costumes worn by the dancers will echo the palette of Bowman’s large canvases hanging at intervals along the nave. As an accompaniment, Linda Hirst’s voice will respond to the work, producing contrasting elements of the human voice reciting passages from the poetry of John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Sue Hubbard.
ATHELHAMPTON HOUSE: Saturday 3 October – Monday 30 November 2026.
Dance Event: Saturday 3 October 2026, 2.00pm; Private View: 2.30pm
In this recently refurbished Tudor manor house nestled in the Dorset countryside, will stage this body of work in the newly created long gallery throughout October and November 2026. Alongside Bowman’s work will be displayed the basket ware of Henrietta Irving. The two artists, who only met twelve months ago, find a deep connection with the materials they use and the resultant shapes and forms that are created. Henrietta will be making coiled raffia vessels and paper pieces on the theme of Timelines. She is inspired by changes in landscape and buildings over the centuries at Athelhampton in Dorset. Traces of medieval fishponds are still visible in the grounds, if you know where to look. The current buildings form part of what was a much larger complex. Wings and rooms were repurposed or demolished to suit the needs and aspirations of the owners. Henrietta’s work will consider these changes, gradual dereliction or deliberate destruction and replacement, in three-dimensional form.
The exhibition at Athelhampton House will open with a dance performance in the Great Hall choreographed by Lizzi Kew Ross www.lizzikewrossandco.co.uk.
It’s a curious connection that Athelhampton House is less than 10 miles from Tolpuddle and the museum that celebrates the farm workers who, less than 200 years ago, stood up to the authorities demanding fair pay. Their payment came in the form of seven years hard labour in Australia. A successful campaign for their pardon and return made them pivotal figures in the UK labour movement and the history of trade unionism.
THE SLADE CENTRE, The Slade Building, The Square, Gillingham SP8 4AY. Thursday 25 February Saturday 3 April 2027.
In contrast to the grand settings of Malmesbury Abbey and Athelhampton House, the exhibition of Bowman and Irving’s work moves to The Slade Centre in Gillingham in February 2027 along with a dance and voice performance by Lizzi Kew Ross and Linda Hirst. This is a move of which the Tolpuddle Martyrs would undoubtedly have approved, for The Slade Centre is a former department store in the centre of a working town whose prosperity is linked to the railway line which transformed the town in the late 1800s.
Through the combined arts of painting, dance, poetry, voice and 3-dimensional craft, Marking Out the Boundaries aims to bring history into the present and offer an insight into the past.
A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition with an essay by the writer and critic Andrew Lambirth.
“Aged two years, I espied it and thought I’d fill the pages with my drawings as at the top of each page, printed in grey, were cherubs; these I attempted to copy, page after page after page!”
‘ Like many artists I spent much of my early study at art school following figuration, albeit loosely. I think it was returning from a trip to visit my brother in South America that led me to explore the use of larger canvases that in turn led to larger more gestural shapes and that in turn led me into abstraction. I felt then, and still do, that through abstraction I am able to achieve an essence; much like poetry which, for me, through its brevity achieves a similar essence. ‘
Read the Aesthetica Art Prize 2024 nomination details here
Aesthetica Magazine is a worldwide destination for art and culture. In-depth features foreground today’s most innovative practitioners across art, design, photography, architecture, music and film. The annual Aesthetica Art Prize aims to highlight current international trends across the arts.
Rise Art Interview with Day Bowman: Treading Between Abstraction and Figuration
“Scale is important to me. I love working large so that my whole body is gesturally creating the marks and slashes and brushstrokes.”
Day Bowman’s paintings recreate the coastal landscape of her childhood home; capturing the tide, the peppery grey sand and the sunlight as it beams down and laps up the sea. With a style which treads the tangential boundary between abstraction and figuration, Day creates complex and inquisitive works full of movement, colour and wonder.
Read the Contemporary British Painting Artist of the Month interview with me here
Growing up in a holiday destination, seaside town it is not surprising that much of Day’s work has referenced the sea, the beach and littoral. In this new series of paintings the canvases echo the marks, lines and shapes that were made in the wet, grey sand of her home town beach: thus the canvas becomes the beach that acted as the canvas of her child hood.
In her current body of work, Seaside Citadels, she has been reflecting on how Britain sees itself: a nation apart or part of a global community? On visiting a number of south coast seaside towns last summer she was struck by the shapes of fortress constructions from castles to Martello Towers and the abandoned pill boxes of WW2, noting that if they hadn’t been saved by English Heritage or converted into smart holiday homes many had fallen into disrepair and ruin. It is these shapes and lines of such fortifications that she has employed in these paintings; echoing, she believes, the small sandcastles she and her brother patted out on the wet sands of childhood beach holidays.
In 2012 Day was commissioned to produce a series of giant hoardings for Weymouth Railway Station, host town to the Olympic Sailing and Paralympic Sailing Events. In 2013 she was one of four artists to represent the U.K. at Nord Art Germany and in 2017/18 her work toured to four museum galleries in China organised by Contemporary British Painting. More recently Bowman has curated a UK wide tour of Edgelands 2016/17 and Getting Away! 2018 exhibited at Arthouse1 Bermondsey and Quay Arts IOW.
Her work has collected numerous awards including: First Prize for Anima Mundi Painting Prize shown at Venice Biennale (2019); First Prize for Bath Arts Open (2019); First Prize in the inaugural Wales Contemporary (2019) Winsor & Newton Prize in the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours (2020); long-listed for Jackson Painting Prize (2022).
In June 2021 Day staged a solo exhibition of work Seaside Citadels at Bermondsey Project Space London.
Invited to be part of KCAW (Kensington and Chelsea Art Week) 2022 she co-curated Two Painters and a Sculptor at the newly established Hansard Studio in Kensington West London.
Her work is in numerous private and public collections worldwide including: Hilton Hotel Group, British Dental Association; Dorset County Hospital; St. Vincent and the Grenadines Art Collection; Yantai Art Museum China and the Priseman Seabrook Collection.