Cecil Howell —
Art, Design, and Research
Cecil Howell is an artist with a practice that includes visual art, design, and landscape architecture. Her work studies the land, probing the geological, cultural, and ecological histories of place in order to understand how we are shaped by the ground beneath us and how we, in turn, shape it. After 9 years of working for landscape architecture firms, include Hargreaves, Future Green, and Margie Ruddick Landscape, Cecil created her own studio, Object + Field in order to expand her practice beyond the built environment and into artistic explorations of the human imagination.
Since opening Object + Field, she has collaborated with the renowned artist, Maya Lin and designer, Edwina von Gal. She has been awarded numerous residencies and her work was featured in several exhibitions and magazines, including Wonderground Journal (Fall 2021) and Orion (Spring 2021). Additionally, she frequently collaborates with scientists helping them visualize their research and data.
cecil@cecilhowell.com
2024.
Between two mirrors
This series explores the infinite reflections between the physcial and abstract world. The pieces begin with casts of the ground. In this act of abstraction, the forms are rendered scaless, they appear to be models of the earth from thousands of feet above. In pairing these casts with mirrors, smooth metals, stones, and magnifying lenses, the real texture is reflected, deformed, and scattered.
These assemblages evoke the experience of walking through the landscape, eyes moving between the ground and a phone, alight with maps that tell us where we are and where we are going. Not only are we constantly shifting between the abstract and physical, we are shifting in scales, between the bump in the sidewalk and the elastic digital map.
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These assemblages evoke the experience of walking through the landscape, eyes moving between the ground and a phone, alight with maps that tell us where we are and where we are going. Not only are we constantly shifting between the abstract and physical, we are shifting in scales, between the bump in the sidewalk and the elastic digital map.
2024.
Phantom Limb
The scientist Lauren Oakes writes that a forest is ‘a stream of matter and energy’, a fitting description for a city as well. ‘Phantom Limb’ presses pause on this stream for a moment, arresting the flow of growth and decay long enough for us to bear witness. Rising from the ground as a grid of wooden dowels, the sculpture creates a scaffolding on which branches float. The branches, in turn, provide the cross supports necessary to strengthen the orthogonal structure of the grid. ‘Phantom Limb’ flickers between movement and suspension, hewn and raw wood, the grid and organic forms; creating a tension that energizes the sculpture.
2024.
These infinitely obscure lives
This is an archive of the ephemeral. It is a series of drawings, primarily in pastel on paper, of the ground.
Each drawing begins with a memory of the ground in mind, but moves away from a particular place/time as the composition and emotion of the drawing unfolds. In this way they are part diagram and part dream, part map and part memory. The series highlights the accumulation of subtle compositions that make our days, but also speak to the fragility I feel, we all feel, so acutely right now; with a gust of wind everything changes.
