Hannah Rowan’s work explores what it means to exist as interconnected Bodies of Water.

Hannah Rowan (b. 1990, Brighton, UK) is a British multidisciplinary artist based in New York. She holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London.

Working across sculpture, installation, performance, video and sound, Rowan examines the relationships between bodies, water and wider ecological and geological systems. Informed by hydrofeminist theory and embodied, site-based research, her practice explores intimacy, impermanence and material transformation. Her research has taken her from the Atacama Desert to the High Arctic, tracing the movement of water through melting ice, weather systems and bodily fluids.

Rowan works with materials including ceramic, glass, metal, water, salt and organic matter, drawing attention to their capacity to melt, dissolve, oxidise, crystallise and take root. These processes allow her to consider matter as active and continually changing, while exploring the connections between human bodies and the environments they inhabit. Moving between material science, embodiment and ecological thought, her work challenges the idea that the human body exists separately from the living world.

Her research in Cyprus has developed across several bodies of work. In her cyanotypes—an early form of camera-less photography—light-sensitive chemicals, sunlight and water are used to create images that bring together the body, landscape and vessel. In Tresses Vessels, the outline of the artist’s hair flows into painted vessels, recalling streams of water, beams of light and submerged root systems. In Desert Vessels, Glacier Vessels and Tidepool Vessels, she combines cyanotype processes with photographs taken in the Arctic, the Atacama Desert and Cyprus.

During a more recent period of research and production in Limassol, Rowan developed the ceramic sculptures presented in Carriers. Drawing on pregnancy, breastfeeding and the transition into motherhood, these works take the form of torsos, vessels, breastplates and protective shells. Through botanical, marine and anatomical references, they explore care, protection, vulnerability and the interdependence of bodies and their environments.

Rowan’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held in public and private collections, including the Dakis Joannou Collection and the Anthropocene Collection at MUSE – Science Museum in Trento, Italy.