Priscilla Rose Howe, Rabid

Priscilla Rose Howe’s drawings are obscene. Her work depicts a universe of apocalyptic pageantry, rendered in coloured pencil. Ribcages open like altars, meat floats like relics, and matriarchs leer over butchered pigs in domestic spaces warped into sites of ritual and rupture.

Howe’s aesthetic is low-budget and high-intensity—part Troma gore, part John Waters camp. Her images warp femininity, religiosity, and home life into grotesque theatre. The result is a kind of psychic autopsy: part shrine, part punchline. There’s no clean narrative here, no moral lesson—just ecstatic disorder.

Executed in slow, scratchy pencil, these drawings are painstaking acts of desecration and devotion. In Howe’s hands, the pencil becomes both scalpel and wand, cutting and conjuring. Her bodies are not whole, nor do they aspire to be. They sprawl, grin, ooze, and glow. The violence is visible, but so is the humour. Through absurdity and excess, Rabid seeks revelation.

This is mysticism by meat tray—a theology of the broken, the defiled, and the divine. A lipstick smile. A halo of ribs. A sofa soaked in vomit and roses. The familiar is rendered strange, and the strange, sacred.

In a culture where repression and respectability often go hand in hand, Howe’s work leans sideways. It refuses good taste, coherence, and control. Instead, it offers something more unruly: a cracked kind of spirituality, where queerness, trauma, and laughter are part of the same ritual.

The above was adapted from the exhibition text Tuatua Soup by DJCS, written to accompany the show.