Barbara Howey
Barbara Howey is a painter who lives and works in Norwich. Her BA was in painting at Leicester Polytechnic in 1991, followed by an MA in Feminism in the Visual Arts at Leeds University in 1992 and a practice-based PhD in painting at Norwich School of Art and Design in 2001. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions and has taken part in major UK painting prizes including the John Moores and Exeter Phoenix Contemporary. In 2018 she was artist in residence at Norsk Kunstnersenter Dale, Norway. In 2022-23 she co-curated an exhibition of paintings with the late Dr Judith Tucker called Entwined - Plants in Contemporary Painting in collaboration with University of Huddersfield Art Gallery and in 2025 co-curated Plant Power at Groundwork Gallery in memory of the late Dr Judith Tucker with Dr Veronica Sekules. She is a member of the artist led group Contemporary British Painting.
Artist Statement
My current body of work is paintings based on plants and their relationship with other non-human life, in the main insects and birds. Part of my process is photographing the species of plants seen on my daily walks, not rare but local, some native and some finding a space to grow where seeds have blown them from suburban gardens and wastelands. From ancient bluebell woods, woodlands due to be "developed", field edges, local marshes and roadside verges.
The paintings are made rapidly wet into wet in one sitting, leaving unrefined stains, drips and marks, in an attempt to capture both the aliveness and vitality of the plants, and the fleeting moments of their precarious and endangered lives and to lay bare the painting process itself. Plants are extraordinary in that they provide the air we breathe and the food we eat and we are utterly dependant on them, and yet we seem blind to this and continue to poison, pollute and deforest what once was abundant and diverse. Painting nature has a renewed relevance today in the light of climate change and biodiversity loss.
My work references plants but also reimagines them through the process of gestural marks and heightened colour to create a space which slides between representation and abstraction and back again. Whilst the references are strongly related to the observable plant world, the work is just as much about self-expression and the nature of painting itself.