Nancy Bowen

[21] At SAIC, she was drawn to surrealism, outsider art, feminism and the work of women artists like Louise Bourgeois and her teacher Ree Morton, interests that planted the seeds of her longstanding exploration of the physical experience of the female body.

[23][26] She gradually introduced anonymous figures in metaphorical, dynamic poses exploring female experience and sexuality, placed over vividly painted relief or shadowbox structures, and later, abstract sculptural settings.

[6] In her sculpture, she has consistently employed unusual combinations of materials related to craft (and by that association, to women)—clay, glass, wax, ribbon, beads, synthetic hair, copper and wire—as well as non-Western symbolic systems of representation and thought.

[32][7][33][8] She takes a similar, loosely archeological approach to her works on paper, scavenging ornamental motifs from other cultures and belief systems that she mixes, adds and redacts in relation to more personal elements.

[38][4][39] Alternately graceful and clunky, ethereal and carnal, they triggered contradictory associations: prosthetic devices and ornamental plant stands, ambiguous body parts, constricting 19th-century undergarment support.

[41] Boston Globe critic Cate McQuaid described works like Cerebral Flora (2004) as "comical, excited and strangely beautiful" pieces that "make seen the unseen—the explosion of an idea or an anatomical eruption.

[12][8] In Territory (2010) she draped a lacy garment of blue beads over a swelling, mountainous, vaguely anthropomorphic figure of unpainted white plaster topped with a jeweled porcelain tower.

[12][13] Bowen's analog-digital collages coalesce the disparate cultures and languages of contemporary art, laconic Yankee practicalism and Eastern belief into what critic Nancy Princenthal called works of "hypnotic complexity.

"[12][13] The layered works she exhibited at Purchase College in 2011 combined meteorological and astronomical lists and text from 19th-century farmers' almanacs (from her father's collection), rubbings of early American tombstones taken by her grandfather and linear patterns recalling Eastern imagery.

They included Blue Angel, a collage in which she doubled a grave marker impression of a winged skull over a checkered ground of almanac entries webbed with black thread and colored-paper circles that suggested a Tantric chart.

[36][5][43] The installation, Spectral Evidence (2021), consisted of twenty squat "grave markers" with wings, skull heads and shoes projecting from beneath that stood before a ghostly, faceless life-size figure wearing a black hair shirt.