Priscilla Rose Howe, Rabid

Tuatua Soup
DJCS

Priscilla Rose Howe’s drawings are obscene. Her work depicts a universe of apocalyptic pageantry, rendered in coloured pencil. A smiling figure reclines across a crummy floral couch beneath a row of fossilised jawbones; a table of ghoul-faced matriarchs gather over a butchered pig; a figure spreads themselves wide, ribcage open to the heavens, surrounded by chunks of meat. The drawings are psychic autopsies. Portals.

Howe’s aesthetic is low-budget and high-intensity. Like the palette of a Troma Entertainment film, or the trash-camp of John Waters, Howe’s drawings refuse good taste in favour of something more potent. They operate through what theorist José Esteban Muñoz might call disidentification, a queering of cultural tropes through exaggeration and mutation. Her drawings warp femininity, domesticity, and religiosity.

The Troma lineage is especially resonant. In Tromeo and Juliet (1996), Shakespeare’s tragedy becomes a carnival of incest, punk aesthetics, and low-res gore. What’s compelling is not just the outrageousness, it’s the way Troma weaponises failure as style. Narrative coherence collapses. Production values disintegrate. What emerges is a theatre of negation: a refusal to be respectable, clean, straight.

Howe’s drawings operate similarly. Organs, ribs, and vulva are flayed open in a pose somewhere between religious martyrdom and pornographic spectacle. The figure is framed like a stage, surrounded by floating cuts of meat, like holy relics or supermarket bargains. It is part shrine, part punchline.

The drawings do not ask for empathy, or moralise. They offer something closer to Genesis P-Orridge’s concept of “cut-up identity” - the self as a collage of meat, symbol, ritual, and kink. In this context the body is sacred precisely because it is fragmented, defiled, and absurd. Howe’s practice is mysticism by meat tray.

It’s important to acknowledge that Howe’s works are made in pencil. Meticulous, scratchy, slow. Pencil is not a medium of speed or spontaneity. It requires attention, repetition, and has a possibility for erasure. In Kabbalistic thought, the concept of the ‘shattering of vessels’ describes the moment when divine light could not be contained by its appointed forms, causing a cosmic rupture. Howe’s pencil drawings enact this theology. Each form acts like a vessel under pressure, straining to hold its meaning. But the vessels break, and what pours out is laughter, blood, queerness, meat.

Drawing, for Howe, is an act of cosmological disorder, a reconfiguration of symbols we thought we understood. The kitchen becomes a crime scene. The body becomes both altar and abattoir. The dinner table becomes a tribunal of leering, misshapen elders. Her pencil operates as a scalpel and a wand, carving and conjuring.

In Aotearoa, where respectability and repression often operate hand in hand, especially across the axes of class and gender, Howe’s drawings act as an ungluing of the nation’s interior logic. The domestic spaces she depicts are deeply familiar - the couch is floral, the curtains are laced, the room is carpeted in a scratchy 70s red. A reclining figure wears a red and black lingerie set, their smile stretched too wide. Behind them, three jawbones hang like trophies. What kind of family lives here? What is being consumed?

There’s a deep critique of patriarchy embedded in these works through structure and affect. A row of grotesque women - part judge, part puppet, part corpse - recalls a boardroom, a church committee, or a meat market auction. The central pig, bisected and splayed, becomes a surrogate for the absent body, or perhaps the body as it is always seen under patriarchy: consumable. Yet, the pig glows. It anchors the scene, inviting horror while compelling attention. There is power in refusing to look away.

The brilliance of Howe’s work lies in its ability to oscillate between trauma and camp, between sacred and absurd. The work seeks revelation through exposure. By making the violence visible, by restaging the theatre of gender through absurdity, Howe opens up a different kind of spirituality. A cracked one.

These drawings revel in the aesthetics of poor taste as a tactic. As a way of resisting the smoothness of capital, the clarity of binaries, the demand for resolution. In doing so, they produce a space for what Sara Ahmed calls ‘queer orientations,’ bodies that lean sideways, break rhythm, and refuse the straight line. In this sense, Howe’s drawings are profoundly hopeful. Not because they depict hope, but because they reject the lie that things were ever whole to begin with. They offer the sacred in shards. A rib cage halo. A sofa covered in vomit and roses. A lipstick smile.