This exhibition is full of vivid images portraying birds in colour-saturated settings where they overlap complex fragmentary backgrounds, many derived from engravings and textiles. The rich mash-ups of visual ideas on the backgrounds are playfully and skillfully rendered using meticulous brushstrokes often suggestive of those industrial process

View the illustrated catalogue for Stephen Bowers: A Conference of Birds, including an essay by Leslie Ferrin.

“I live in a small rural town settled in the 1700’s by English colonists on the land of the Indigenous people, the Norwottucks. Located at the Western end of Hampshire County in the foothills of the Berkshires, an area known as the Hilltowns, we are about 110 miles west of Boston and 180 miles North of New York City. As director of Ferrin Contemporary, from where I sit in my office, Australia is half a world away. Yet, as I look at images of works in this exhibition, I vividly recall my own residency and research in the place where these pieces have their genesis – Adelaide, South Australia. 

The journey that brought me to Adelaide began in the summer of 2006, the year we established Project Art, a ceramic focused residency initiative located in an old historic river mill we had renovated on Main Street in Cummington, a small New England village. Stephen was well known to us through his exhibitions at art fairs, museums and galleries in the US – and he was one of the first guests at Project Art.”

–Leslie Ferrin

VIEW THE CATALOG ON ISSUU

Stephen Bowers Interview with the Artist 2024 | By Lauraine Diggins Fine Art

Stephen Bowers discusses his ceramic artwork, the inspirations and methods of production. In this exhibition A Conference of Birds, Stephen has created a ‘flock’ of ceramic plates depicting birds derived from historical illustrations, which were often completed from museum specimens. A focus for Stephen in this exhibition was to achieve a background of even saturated colour, which is a difficult feat to achieve. Certain plates break up the colour through the use of patterning or feature a sunburst effect, similar to that found on guitars. The plates are further adorned with roundels of patterns, looking to designs by English artists William Morris, a major figure of the Arts and Crafts movement of the 19th century and William Kilburn, a leading designer of the 18th century. This use of patterning explores the notion of patterns-in-nature and nature-in-pattern and how we appropriate nature, as well as speaking to Stephen’s environmental concerns, the fragments reflecting the disconnection between humanity and the natural world.

LEARN MORE ABOUT STEPHEN BOWERS

Stephen Bowers (b.1952, Sydney, lives and works in in Norwood, South Australia) is a self-taught artist working in ceramics- often focusing on strikingly decorative textiles, wallpapers, comic strips, natural history illustration found within the imagery of his childhood in the mid-1970’s. Close observation of his often seemingly innocent decorations of cockatoos, kangaroos, and willow patterns, reveals subtexts of irony, commentary, and social observation, inviting viewers to look beyond the bravura of the surface to discover a complex and layered world.

Bowers has participated in numerous international exhibitions within Australia and overseas, including the UK, Norway, Italy, Denmark and China and here in the states. His work is included in numerous permanent collections, including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA), Brooklyn Museum of Art, (NY, NY), National Museum of Art Architecture and Design, (Oslo, Norway), Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, (LA, CA), Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, (Launceston, Tasmania)  Museum of International Ceramic Art, (Denmark), Australian National Gallery, (Canberra, Australia), Powerhouse Museum, (Sydney, Australia) National Museum of History, (Taipei Taiwan), Parliament House, (Canberra Australia), among many others.