Priscilla Rose Howe, Green Lipped

Priscilla Rose Howe's intricate pencil drawings reference the fantastical and fluid world of films, cartoons, circus, and vaudeville — spaces where theatricality and performance take centre stage.

Priscilla Rose Howe is fascinated by the realms that we cannot see, what we cannot touch, with the subconscious, the dissociative, the afterlife, and the paranormal. Since she was young Priscilla has chased otherworldliness. As a queer artist, she sees potential in otherworldliness. The characters in her work live out the freedom that exists in these disparate spaces — in a society that isn’t so heteronormative, so based on a binary reality.

Her intricate pencil drawings reference the fantastical and fluid world of films, cartoons, circus, and vaudeville — spaces where theatricality and performance take centre stage. Performing has long been a part of her life. With her drawings, she creates spaces for her characters, and our imaginations, to perform within and to challenge how we operate within domestic and built environments.

The works in Green Lipped are set in the theatre of the domestic environment on the wild West Coast, a place of refuge and memory for Priscilla. In these works, her characters are performing the act of preparing and consuming food, of entertaining, of dreaming.

Priscilla has a Bachelor of Visual Communication Design from Massey University, Wellington, and lives in Ōtautahi, Christchurch. Recent exhibitions include Cruel Optimism, Artspace Aotearoa 2021, Tāmaki Makaurau; She’s not a great piece of furniture, but she’s got good legs, Hot Lunch, 2021, Ōtautahi; Solo show, Wet Green, Aotearoa Art Fair 2021, Tāmaki Makaurau.