London
“Slow Puncture,” Harriet Bowman’s traveling Mark Tanner Sculpture Award exhibition, features 12 sculptures that encompass casting, layering, mold-making, and construction. Glass and metal predominate, though horsehair, rubber, clay, and leather also enter into the mix. At first, these works present a frustrating ambiguity. Sleekly engineered rods and brackets in brushed metal are paired with panels and pans of bespoke glass. Clay residue sits in liquid on a horizontal glass panel raised on a steel trestle, and a chamois cloth lies casually draped over the corner of one mysterious, vaguely scientific construction.
The impression of a workshop or laboratory at rest reinforces the suspicion of having stepped off the street and into the wrong address. We might be looking at tools or instruments, perhaps for testing the tolerance of materials routinely placed under stress. One structure projects more than two feet into the visitor’s space at chest height. A horizontal glass panel bolted onto the geometric framework has the dimensions of a washroom mirror. The glass is opaque, unevenly textured with dimples and dents, sealing in a haphazard calligraphy of dark shapes that resemble cellular strands marooned in a gray fluid not unlike dirty dishwater.
On a raised section of floor strewn with a shallow drift of black, jagged chippings, Bowman has placed two more metal constructions supporting similar glass panels. In one, a sheet of dense glass is bolted vertically to a rectilinear frame. Hanging off it is the chamois cloth, which introduces a muted orange tone into the narrow color spectrum. Its folds partly obscure the confusion of black filaments overspilling the perimeter of a ringed shape molded into the glass panel, which resembles the transparent hatch of a front-loading washing machine.
A more decidedly sculptural scenario surfaces with two sets of translucent casts mounted on crudely modeled wall brackets in cream-colored plasticine, one of them wheel-shaped and propped on the floor amid more chippings. Rounded glass objects, clear of any insertion, these casts correspond in size with the head looking into them. With their organic forms and gentle concavities, it is hard to resist the urge to rest against them.
Remembering the exhibition title “Slow Puncture”—which conjures the gradual leak of air from a tire, changes in shape, and a loss of function with potentially serious consequences—brings sudden clarity. Maybe the connection to automobiles should have dropped sooner: a brief glance at Bowman’s background (she was raised in the rural English county of Devon, where road transport is a necessity and a sport) reveals a fascination with cars that accounts for what can now see as chassis-like frameworks, windshield-like panels, cast headrests, and molds of tires.
Photo: Tim Bowditch
The wild interplay of possibilities and alternating narratives was worth the trip, however, and it seems intended. Multiple processes unfold in Bowman’s work, and evolution of meaning is one of them, replacing any need for conclusions. What would those conclusions be anyway? The works themselves possess a strong sense of speculation, retaining a work-in-progress character that keeps the journey going without the prospect of a definite, physical finality, achieved through the unexpected outcomes resulting from experimentation. What happens when molten glass is fired into a ceramic mold at high speed? Or when horsehair is melted into sand, ash, and lime before floating the glass over tin to create a uniform sheet?
Why horsehair? This traditional upholstery filling comes from a creature whose toil was supplanted by the combustion engine (recalled, by way of tribute, in the measurement of horsepower). Bowman discovered that when horsehair-infused glass is driven through heat, broken-down filaments ooze, pool, and melt chemicals. As the glass pulls and stretches to accommodate the misbehaving interloper, it also swells and puddles. Uneven, it emerges weakened, prone now to fracturing and rupture under duress, its critical faculty of strength impaired.
It is worth keeping an eye on the words that Bowman uses. There is a game in play, facilitated by language. Thus, a frisson accompanies the encounter with matter behaving badly, with a fatal outcome always a possibility. A case in point are three sculptures of distorted roundels, each called Doughnut. Made from sea-green and sage-colored fragments of car-window glass mounted on simple metal stalks, they have the appearance of wreaths or trophies. Yet context requires that the circular forms imply misshapen tires, the particulated material a result of applied force—an allusion to the “donut” of car enthusiasts and its distinctive skid mark. The object with the chamois, Now is the time to drink, suddenly reveals the vulnerable side of a vehicle meant to keep its human cargo secure. We say these machines possess bodies: both human and car bodies are subject to catastrophic physical breakdown in situations where control is lost.
This perhaps explains why Bowman’s works have the look of elementary workshop gantries charged with investigating compromised structures and their potential for change. The shredded fragments on the floor are reprocessed wheel casings. Full Body (large glass) (2026), with its allusion to Duchamp, makes a nod to the legacy of recuse with windshield glass and draws connections to Modernist art history.
Opportunities to quote Cardinal John Henry Newman in art reviews are rare. But the creative conceptual drift in Bowman’s work bears out his observation that “ideas don’t exist statically…., rather they exist in the play of lively minds.” On the evidence of these works, the art world can expect her career to continue to move the gears.
Harriet Bowman’s “Slow Puncture” is on view at the Art House, Wakefield, U.K., through July 9, 2026.
