Emily Grace Lowe

Residing in me is a deeply rooted passion for discovering and revealing the places and moments where the hidden spark of life becomes visible—where wonder and awe stop me dead in my tracks. I am motivated by a profound love for the cycles of creation and manifestation, for the processes of life: dormancy, germination, unfurling, ripening, death and decomposition. The intimate relationship between microcosm and macrocosm fascinates me, and my inspiration is always vacillating between these two poles; mycelium and migration pathways, seeds and star nurseries, the breath and the tides. As a photography student, I was most enamored by the process of revelation that took place in the darkroom. This enthusiasm was further nurtured during a decade of farming, directly experiencing these cycles of life with my hands in the soil—eagerly awaiting a seed swelling in the dark, then erupting into sight and giving form to a flower. Years later these experiences were translated yet again when I began to draw and paint; the images arriving from the dark planes of the imagination through heart, hand, pigment and onto the paper.

I strive to bring forth images which represent both my curiosity and experience of our living world in a never-ending flux of veiling and unveiling, birthing and dying, expanding and contracting; all of life constantly communicating and revealing our interconnectedness. For me, making art is a call to illuminate a forgotten sacred dimension of life and therefore participate in the act of creation—both artist and viewer are invited to witness, and hopefully experience, our intrinsic belonging to this Earth. I believe that art is a gift from the Earth with a divine purpose, and one of the functions of the artist is to give this gift back to humanity and the Earth in this time of unprecedented ecological, planetary and spiritual crisis.