Collective III

“Weaved with compulsive gesture, Pam Bowman’s latest work is an amalgam of personal experience and communal navigation.  Important to understanding Bowman’s work is an appreciation of ritual, experience, and process.  Collective is the result of thousands of sinuous fibers looped together over and over in a continuous braid.  The fibers are caulking cotton, a material used to bind and seal wooden planks together in ship-building.   The artist used over thirty-five miles of the twined cotton in the work as a material reference to domesticity.  An integral part of interpreting the work is a comprehension of the compulsive nature of process: a repetitive method symbolic of memory, ceremony, and ritual.  For Bowman, the intertwined strings represent the intersections of people, the combined whole ultimately stronger than the individual.  But the work has more to offer than the seemingly simple analogy, as the ropes do not idly line up but violently pull, cover, tug, and jockey for position in a complex shared journey.”

 

Jeff Lambson

Curator of Contemporary Art, Brigham Young University Museum of Art

 

Collective II

Collective I