PHOTO BY PHIL SMITH COVER FEATURE Paul Bowen ADRIFT IN TIME AND PLACE BY ANDRÉ VAN DER WENDE PAUL BOWEN’S fascination with the past is our reward. His insatiable curiosity with history, and his place within it, is in many ways what drives his work. Watching him in the overstuffed confines of his Vermont garage, enthusiastically combing through boxes of nineteenth- century clay pipes, their constituent stems and bowls, clay marbles, and fractured porcelain from old dolls, is to feel him reach to the past so that he may understand the present. “For some reason I’ve always been attracted to waste material, something that’s had a previous use or another life of some sort, broken things,” Bowen says, turning between his thumb and forefinger the calcified inner-ear bone of a pilot whale, another one of his “curiosities.” To call him a sculptor of “found” materials is lazy and far too narrow a designation, if only because Bowen has made equally inspired drawings, paintings, prints, and textiles. “I’m no found object purist,” he declares, but his ability to connect his materials to history through arresting form without scarifying their original character is undisputed. Bowen’s repurposing of indigenous materials is a form of transfig- uration, a recontextualizing of matter into an homage for people and place through a legacy of discarded and forgotten objects that are as intrinsic to a region as the landscape that hides them and the people who reveal them. This connection to the trace history of a regional culture, the people who worked, loved, and lost their way before him, doesn’t reside as some form of sticky romanticism flounderingagainst the rocks of weary nostalgia. Hardly. Bowen gives his work a firmlycontemporary footing that’s grounded not so much in time as it is in “place.” Location, location, location. It provides him with his raw materials, reclaimed and recycled from the sea, the river, or the town itself, but it also gives him a conceptual frame on which to hang his work. Bowen’s intention, it seems, is not to add to what already exists but rather to use what’s right in front of him, coveting materials that come fully loaded with the patina of the past so that he may give them another chance in the present. Scavenged wood from old fish boxes,rescued cable drums, and storm-damaged objects tossed up on the tide—all of his materials carry their own stories. Bowen’s canny resourcefulness is unique, a “what you see is what you get” pragmatism that redirects our attention to the everyday, the discarded, the infirm detritus that he notices and carefully reassembles into tributes that hold integrity and ingenuity in high esteem. What he findsmay be a bundle of truncated oars, a blue tarp shrouding a small inverted stool, or slats of raw wood from old fish boxes brined with history, but Bowen’s ability to turn the mundane into magic is what defineshim. His tone of expressive vernacular is singular, a poetic coda for abandoned materials enshrined in a codependency of structural viability and meaning. Salvaging old boards from a storm-damaged home, he can take another’s misfortune and turn it into something affective and meaningful enough that the SMITH person can forget the original calamity. Bowen’s refinementtoward the one-of-a-kind is what transposes PHIL BY PHOTO PROVINCETOWN ARTS.ORG 39 Paul Bowen and his Vermont studio barn PHOTOS BY ANDRÉ VAN DER WENDE his materials from the realm of the ordinary to the extraordinary, honing from Bowen’s front door. Our visit has been delayed three times due to a deeply personal truth by tapping into the uniqueness of his medium and winter storms and scheduling conflicts,and when we finallyconvene it’s early the people it touches along the way—it exists within a continuum, in and April. There are snow flurriesin the air but less than a foot of accumulation out of time itself. on the ground, as winter makes its slow retreat. It’s the gloomy beginning The story of how a sixty-four-year-old Welshman came to end up in of mud season, but Bowen offers comfort with a broad smile and bowls of southern Vermont, after spending nearly thirty years living in Province- homemade chicken soup, his cooking prowess as rustic and true as his art. town, has a rough-hewn charm that seems to fit the same way Bowen’s He’s a natural, animated conversationalist, an attentive listener who loves sculptures just seem to align themselves within their own innate logic. This to steer the spotlight away from himself, if only to stop and take genuine fall will mark ten years since Bowen and his wife, the writer Pamela Man- interest in those around him. His Welsh accent has softened over time, dell, moved to Williamsville, twenty minutes north of Brattleboro. “We and he talks as much with his hands as he does with his quick, bright eyes, sort of stumbled into Vermont,” Bowen explains. “I was artist-in-residence which are shielded beneath his prominent dark brows. He is self-deprecat- at Dartmouth College [Hanover, New Hampshire], and I had just learned ing, will always defer to the abilities of others before announcing his own, to drive around that time, so on weekends I started exploring and I found and throughout our stay begins more than one story with the words, “I’ve this little area and sort of fell for it. I had lived in Provincetown for twenty- done some dumb-ass things in my time!” followed by a mischievous, slightly nine years, and I think the seasonal thing had become just a bit too wheezy “Hee, hee, hee!” and peals of laughter. much. The prospect of living in a really vibrant year-round community Paul Bowen applies his personal truth, his authenticity and humility, was very appealing.” to his work, a physical manifestation that’s a direct extension of his ap- Certainly, the economic viability of Provincetown versus Vermont also proach to life, and not wanting his art to be separate from it in any way. played a part, but Bowen appears settled now, not even dissuaded by the Art helps codify the different strands that give Bowen a sense of identity, a threat of floods and bears in the woods. “There’s a very big art community true self among the fray that extends beyond oceans and borders. Consider here, but not like it is on the Cape. It’s more diverse, I would say. This neck the raised eyebrows when Bowen upped stakes and traded the glazed heat of the woods has a tremendous connection to the Cape though. I can’t tell and expanse of Provincetown for the steep hills and deep valleys of rural you how many people we know who live here who lived on the Cape, or even Vermont. Provincetown is as ingrained in him as his Welsh roots. And so go back and forth to the Cape. We have half a dozen friends within just a now is Williamsville, Vermont, in the Green Mountains, a world away under few miles of here who have lived in Provincetown at one time or another. heavy woods and pitched slopes that shadow the narrow road running We actually get together and have potlucks sometimes. It’s amazing!” he through town, leading to Bowen’s house. Moving from an exterior, expan- says, breaking into laughter. sive landscape to a more interior one seems incongruous at first, especially Bowen’s house is set on the upper bank of the Rock River, a modest considering that Bowen grew up facing the Irish Sea off the north coast of tributary spanned by an impressively large covered bridge a stone’s throw Wales before committing three decades to Provincetown. The ocean has 40 PROVINCETOWN ARTS 2015 been key to Bowen’s psyche; but, wherever he resides, he appears to be the His grandparents’ first language was Welsh, at a time when speaking great adapter, immersing himself in his environment and engaging in its this language was prohibited by the laws of English imperialism. In their past, its present, and, ultimately, its future. home, English was similarly barred, making for what Bowen describes as In Vermont, Bowen appears to be just fine, seamlesslyintegrated, with “an interesting kind of dichotomy.” His father and uncle were bilingual but ten years being enough time to qualify this as a third chapter in Bowen’s Bowen never learned to speak Welsh fluently, something he regrets: “Not arc as an artist and a fellow traveler. He didn’t come here to be a farmer having the language of your home cuts you off from so much of the culture.” since he’s always been one—he’s still collecting his wood from the water, He’s been trying to bridge the gap ever since, excavating and forging an only now it’s wood from the river instead of the ocean; instead of making identity nearly forty years after his arrival in the New World. squid ink, it’s walnut ink, five-gallon buckets of the stuff fermenting beneath One can draw a line back from the kind of abiding self-sufficiency that the eaves of his house, enough to last several lifetimes. Weighing how much Bowen honors in his life and work to growing up in Wales during the 1950s his “new” location has affected his work, Bowen says it is difficultto know: and ’60s. As a young child, he had a ration card for orange juice as the “Change is just that—we change wherever we are, and how much of it is really country continued to adjust to postwar life.