b. Sydney, Australia, 1963
Cybele Rowe is a multidisciplinary artist whose monumental bronze casts, clay sculpture and ceramic works are defined by an exuberant abstract language of flowing patterns, colors, and organic shapes. Rowe draws inspiration from nature, Aboriginal art, and the body.
Much of Rowe’s work focuses on her experience of the female body, particularly related to pregnancy and motherhood. In creating monumental ceramic works, Rowe considers the female body as a vessel, as it has been seen throughout much of art history, and as a productive lifeforce. Rowe visualizes harmonious and contradicting states of fragility, strength, and desire. She often adorns the surfaces of her ceramics with pockmarks, scratches, and etchings, evoking the shifting capacities of the body.
Rowe takes inspiration from the landscape and climate of Joshua Tree, where has lived and worked since 2016. She found in the desert the perfect weather conditions for outdoor concrete and clay work. Rowe conceives of her work as responding to the energy vortexes that are present on her land, interacting with the surrounding environment and desert floor on a human scale. While much of her work reads as monumental, Rowe limits her practice to sculptures that she can build and handle herself. She builds her hollow freestanding forms over a matter of days, using a coil technique. Color is integral to the artist’s process, and Rowe applies layers of custom, hand-made glaze onto still-wet clay, allowing colors to absorb and inform the overall composition of her final works. She completes each work by erecting a kiln around the sculpture to fire it on-site.
As Rowe writes about her work, “All of my movements over the surface of the work by hand, tool or paintbrush is done whilst having a dialogue with the medium in real-time. Whether created for a thermal body within a kiln or the poured surface of bronzes, being carved from wood or forms cast in concrete, paintings or tuftings, there are many mistakes within a work, all accumulating with my decisions to try and coax it to completion. These actions can be glorious with an unexpected success story or a complete disaster. These mistakes are never in vain, they are always teachers in the dialogue of building and that is where the art lies for me. My works, like me, are not perfect, ever.”
Rowe received her BA in Fine Arts as well as her postgraduate degree in Professional Art Studies from the City Art Institute University in New South Wales. Rowe relocated to New York City in 1990 after the Australian Council of the Museum of Modern Art offered her a grant to study abroad and further develop her work. She maintained a studio in Upper East Side until relocating to Silverado in 1998. In 2016, she moved to her current residence in Yucca Valley, California.
Rowe’s work has been displayed in the World Bank, the Kennedy Center, and the Smithsonian. The 2018 Los Angeles Art Show and The Palm Springs Art Show saw her monumental sculptures as centerpieces, and she was named among the "Most Influential People" by the Orange County Weekly Magazine in 2015.
Rowe has also taught clay courses to elementary school children, and in 2013 was the artist in residence and head teacher at the National Art School in Sydney, Australia. She also led a course at Saddleback College.
