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
2026.
A Cosmos Underfoot
These drawings begin with the snowfall of this past winter, observing the texture, movement, and color of fleeting moments on the ground. They operate as a kind of nearsighted index of the winter landscape. At this scale, mounds become mountains, folds resemble crevasses, and small depressions read as craters. The viewpoint becomes unstable: it is unclear whether we are looking down from high above a planetary surface or crouched close to the ground, our faces inches from the snow.
Part of the difficulty of grasping climate change is that it demands we think across immense scales—both spatial and temporal. The gradual accumulation of molecules released through ordinary routines—driving to the grocery store, cooling our homes with air conditioning, constructing new city blocks—quietly reshapes how heat circulates through the atmosphere, setting planetary transformations in motion. These drawings linger within that tension between the intimate and the planetary. They move between the ground at our feet and the vast systems that surround it, returning attention to the fragile present and inviting viewers to reconsider their place within it.
Pastel offers a tactile, layered process that echoes the material behavior of snow itself. Pigment is built up, blended, and partially lifted away, creating surfaces that register accumulation, erosion, compression, and melt—the same forces that continually remake the winter ground.
Part of the difficulty of grasping climate change is that it demands we think across immense scales—both spatial and temporal. The gradual accumulation of molecules released through ordinary routines—driving to the grocery store, cooling our homes with air conditioning, constructing new city blocks—quietly reshapes how heat circulates through the atmosphere, setting planetary transformations in motion. These drawings linger within that tension between the intimate and the planetary. They move between the ground at our feet and the vast systems that surround it, returning attention to the fragile present and inviting viewers to reconsider their place within it.
Pastel offers a tactile, layered process that echoes the material behavior of snow itself. Pigment is built up, blended, and partially lifted away, creating surfaces that register accumulation, erosion, compression, and melt—the same forces that continually remake the winter ground.
All drawings are Pastel on paper | 9.5" x 6"
2025.
Erratics
Through cutting, blasting, drilling, and digging, humans now move more than thirty billions tons of earth each year - a restless rearranging of the planet’s surface that rivals rivers, glaciers, waves, and wind. Mountains are quarried into cities; riverbeds become foundations; stone travels farther in a single human lifetime than it once did in millennia. Our cities, the terminal moraines of our time, are dense geological accumulations built from distant quarries, river valleys, and ancient seabeds. They are landscapes of assembly, where deep time is pulverized, transported, and paved into the everyday.
This project explores this vast reorganization of matter through an intimate scale: large graphite drawings of small pebbles found on the streets of New York City. These stones - found at the edges of our roads and sidewalks - are residual fragments of immense extractive forces. Yet in drawing them, I am not attempting to catalogue extraction. Instead, by slowly enlarging and rendering each pebble, I invite a shift in perception.
Against the incomprehensible span of geological time, the two weeks it takes to complete a drawing register as brief. And yet, it is precisely within this imbalance that meaning emerges. The drawings acknowledge that while I cannot comprehend deep time in its entirety, I can choose how I attend to its remnants. In this way, symbols of extraction and displacement are reimagined as sites of reflection.
This work is deeply inspired by Joshua DiCaglio’s Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry.
![]()
This project explores this vast reorganization of matter through an intimate scale: large graphite drawings of small pebbles found on the streets of New York City. These stones - found at the edges of our roads and sidewalks - are residual fragments of immense extractive forces. Yet in drawing them, I am not attempting to catalogue extraction. Instead, by slowly enlarging and rendering each pebble, I invite a shift in perception.
Against the incomprehensible span of geological time, the two weeks it takes to complete a drawing register as brief. And yet, it is precisely within this imbalance that meaning emerges. The drawings acknowledge that while I cannot comprehend deep time in its entirety, I can choose how I attend to its remnants. In this way, symbols of extraction and displacement are reimagined as sites of reflection.
This work is deeply inspired by Joshua DiCaglio’s Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry.
2024.
Between two mirrors
A crack in the sidewalk, a new record high temperature, a
memory of this same corner in winter, a glance at the map: as the mind flitters
between these places, scales, and thoughts, what is the experience of being in
landscape? This series, Between Two Mirrors, is centered on this question.
The installations begin with impressions of the ground; removed from their context they shed their scale and flip, multiply, obscure and deform in the mirrors, glass, and stone. The installation renders the landscape as a swirl of particulate matter: a metamorphosis of bits of images, terrain, and experiences that accumulate, however briefly, into a groundless place.
![]()
![]()
The installations begin with impressions of the ground; removed from their context they shed their scale and flip, multiply, obscure and deform in the mirrors, glass, and stone. The installation renders the landscape as a swirl of particulate matter: a metamorphosis of bits of images, terrain, and experiences that accumulate, however briefly, into a groundless place.
