fury brand

You might be new around here, or you might have been following me for a while, but either way, hello. I’m Rowan. Here’s a short (re)introduction!

I’m an artist living in a small town in the UK. I’ve always lived in close proximity to nature, so it’s not surprising that this is a major influence on my work.

So are the stories that I grew up loving (and very much continue to), in books and in games, whether based in fantasy, science fiction or a reflection of our real world. 

Over the years I’ve worked with a wide range of media. I went to art school and focused on video and installation art. Since then I’ve spent most of my time with digital and traditional media of various kinds, but I have a particular love for printmaking, the influence of which finds its way into my digital style too.

In recent years I also became obsessed with designing patterns, which I’ve long had an interest in (mostly through wearing them). Somehow it had never occurred to me that I could actually learn to make them, and since then I've had a great time exploring all the things they can be applied to... (you can find some of them in my shop).

My hobbies are also mostly creative too, including writing, photography, music production and most recently ceramics.

A lot of what I do is created with a desire to share something about my experiences with others, to communicate a feeling, an idea or a place. Sometimes those places are the ones I walk through every day. Sometimes they are places that exist only in my head. Either way, I want to share them and connect with people through doing so. I want my online presence to be about my art, so at times I can shy away from talking about myself, but I’m realising it’s ever more important to do so and is a part of making those connections.

Most of the subjects I choose are natural, and I’ve been an artist all my life working with lots of traditional media, but technology has always played a huge part in that, too. It’s also impossible to create art about nature without also thinking about humanity and the impact that we have on it. How our technological lives coexist alongside it, for better or for worse. I’ve been thinking about how I want to continue combining these things both in the art that I make and also in how I present it.

Social media can be a bane to us sometimes but one thing is certain - I’m really grateful that so many people from around the world have seen and appreciated my work, and connected with it in their own ways. 

Anna Syperek (Canadian, b.1951)

I'll be there when the world stops turning In the end I want to be standing at the beginning with you

Naoko Takeuchi visiting the Kennedy Space Center in the 1990s and meeting an astronaut! She was visiting the Center to do research for her Sailor Moon side story, "The Lover of Princess Kaguya," which was later turned into the Sailor Moon S Movie.

Decades later, when a plushie of Artemis was spotted in the mission control center during the Artemis II mission, Naoko expressed surprise and delight:

“In the manga, he’s the little cat who sends instructions to the Sailor Guardians from the command room,” she said. “That was just a fantasy that existed only in the story, so to think that 30 years later Artemis would appear in NASA’s mission control, a place I’ve always admired, is incredible. I’m so jealous. Thank you for watching over humanity’s great achievement for ten days. You did a wonderful job.”

Part 2!

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

Lovers

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