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In Deep is an exploration of self and of identity. The paintings and prints in this exhibition seem to breathe, drawing the viewer 'in deep' and insistently bringing us back to the body (and the heart), revealing Marg Bowman's preoccupation with the emotional landscape and felt experience. Eleven paintings in oil on small square boards form a punctuated line along two walls of the gallery. At first glance the combination of dark red backgrounds and blurred interior shapes in the paintings produces the effect of movement, a visual heartbeat in an otherwise contained space. On closer inspection the substance of each painting both reveals and conceals, at once confrontational in bold shades of red, and elusive, defying any single interpretation.
The individual works are untitled, and this act of not naming leaves us to our own unmediated interpretations. The seductive redness of each painting invites the viewer in and a closer look reveals oval, rectangular and linear shapes suggesting varying intensities of feeling, elusive memories and perspectives of self that exist in layers beneath the surface. The paintings encourage a slow awareness. We are left to feel our way through the redness, the shapes beneath, the eddying intensities and moments.The explorations of memory, feeling and self are given clearer representational form in the four prints on the opposite wall. A series of three prints of a young girl are progressively overprinted, the blurred edges suggesting multiple and shifting selves. A single picture of a baby set away on its own suggests vulnerability, fragility and beginnings.