Priscilla Rose Howe

Priscilla Rose Howe is a contemporary artist based in Ōtepoti, Dunedin.

Howe is the kind of whimsically accented storyteller that's as comfortable referencing the pencil drawings of modernist greats as she is pulling gleeful lewdness from subversive and provocative cult films.

Close to the surface of Howe's compositions is the idea of villainy. For whatever reason, it's only in the last few centuries that female sexuality has been taken seriously, where previously the right to pleasure was exclusively active and male. The artist arguably works out of some of this prejudicial residue, dashing the idea of appropriate femme horniness, which fluctuating beauty standards police more scrupulously than male counterparts. In another time, women taking charge of their own bodies would have found their sexcapades coming to grisly ends, by burning at the stake or drowning or some other horror in an inventory of religious bloodlust.