He performed in the United Kingdom and internationally (including in Israel, Singapore, Canada, Japan, Germany, Italy and other countries).
The process and outcomes in Howells' signature works were frequently modelled on activities associated with the service industries or the tertiary sector of the economy, such as washing the audience-participant's hair or clothes, or giving an audience-member a bath, replicating in some ways the labour of a hairdresser, laundry worker, or caregiver; or he appropriated and adapted intimate interpersonal experiences in carefully mediated situations, like talking around a script or score in a setting such as a Japanese rock garden in The Garden of Adrian (2009), or holding hands, listening to music, and spooning in silence in Held (2008).
And there are moments when you puncture the performance and it is something real.’[6] Later, Howells recalls, ‘I made a conscientious decision to dispense with the mask of Adrienne – the makeup, hair, and costume.
[7] This work has been widely discussed in terms of the means by which Howells explored intimacy, the pleasures and difficulties of interpersonal communication, and social relations.
[7] Key examples included The Garden of Adrian (2009); The Pleasure of Being: Washing/Feeding/Holding (2010), in which an audience-participant lay in a bath of water and oils and was washed by Howells, then—after leaving the bath—was fed chocolates and held while wrapped in a towel;[7] and his most extensively toured of these performances, Foot Washing for the Sole (2008), a long encounter modelled on a foot massage.
A reviewer wrote: 'The premise is a simple one: Howells has been best man on no fewer than eight occasions; he is something of a wedding expert, and yet he has never been in a long-term relationship.
[11] Howells' final project, Dancer was performed posthumously by Ian Johnston and Gary Gardiner and reviewed by Lyn Gardner for The Guardian newspaper as a 'simple, generous-spirited [and] vulnerable' work full of 'joy and abandon'.