Rowena Hutchinson (b. 1998) is a Sussex based artist living with cancer. Her art uses space and colour to understand the impact of disease and loss. She started to explore these themes as a way to examine her childhood cancer. However since having her second diagnosis the work has become even more important. 

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Rowena Hutchinson’s art practice explores how experiences in life culminate in who you are. This theme came about by her trying to grasp how she felt about her experience of childhood cancer. While its seen by others as a saddening experience, she just saw it as apart of her. When you go through something traumatic it takes away an innocence that was originally there, something she is currently examining through the use of void in her work. She wants the work to highlight the pandemic also as a collective experience that will become a part of all of us.    

Nature plays a huge role in the approach she takes to her work. The fact that a tree hollow made by disease or loss of limb can help the wildlife and insects around it, demonstrates how much we can learn from how nature adapts to a loss. She is inspired by Antoni Gaudi’s approach of rejecting straight lines and corners in his architecture, as they don’t appear in the natural environment. Straight lines for her felt more prescribed and less random, hindering her practice from being totally abstract.

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