TANIA BOWERS

Visual Artist  /  Sculptor  /  Songwriter

ARTIST STATEMENT

Tania Bowers works across sculpture, textile, installation and sound — practices that share a preoccupation with material memory, the body, and the slow accumulation of lived experience. Her visual work is rooted in the tactile, ceramic, cloth and storytelling through mark making. This same attention to texture and emotional precision runs through her parallel work as a songwriter and recording artist, where folk and experimental music traditions converge around questions of voice, landscape and grief. Together these practices form a coherent inquiry into how meaning accrues in materials — woven, worn, or sung.

EDUCATION

Diploma of Visual Arts1997 – 1999

Certificate IV in Training and Assessment 2023

Certificate IV in Arts and Cultural Administration2025

EXHIBITION HISTORY

I Dreamed a Dream Only Dreamers Dream2019

Solo Exhibition — Platform Gallery,Katoomba NSW

A body of textile and sculptural works exploring the permeability between dream states and waking life. Works employed fabric, found objects and constructed form to examine how inner experience leaves its mark on the physical world — surfaces stretched, bound and suspended in states of becoming.

The Language of Flowers2017

Group Exhibition — Lyttleton Art Space.Lawson, NSW

A collaborative exhibition drawing on botanical symbolism and the long history of flowers as coded language. Works in the show used textile, sculpture and material arrangement to explore modes of communication that resist direct speech — the things said sideways, in colour and form.

Blue Mountains Botanica2018

Group Exhibition — Blue Mountains Cultural Centre

Participation in the Blue Mountains Botanica exhibition, a survey of artists responding to the botanical landscape and ecological identity of the Blue Mountains region.

RESIDENCIES

Artist Residency — Big Ci2015

Bilpin, NSW  ·  with Clare Britton  ·  one week

A residential studio practice week exploring textile work as a vehicle for investigating memory — how cloth holds time, touch and experience within its fibres. Situated in the landscape of regional NSW, the residency provided dedicated space to develop material and conceptual threads that continue to inform the work.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Design Assistantapprox. 2000 – 2010

Studio of Robin Richman — Chicago, USA

A decade working in the studio of Chicago-based fashion designer and sculptor Robin Richman, whose practice sits at the intersection of wearable art, material culture and spatial display. Responsibilities encompassed design development, textile sourcing, garment construction, sculptural prop-making and installation. The role provided sustained immersion in an art-led design practice that treated clothing and object-making as inseparable from visual and conceptual inquiry.

MUSIC PRACTICE

Bowers has maintained a parallel practice as a recording artist and songwriter since 1997, working across experimental and folk traditions. Her music shares the same material and emotional concerns as her visual work — attention to texture, voice, place and the weight of feeling over time. Her recordings chart an ongoing inquiry into how song can hold what other forms cannot.

T.Wilds2021

Most recent studio release. Available through Cheersquad Records.

Ongoing Recording Practice1997 – present

Multiple releases across an independent recording career spanning nearly three decades, including Spdfgh, Sunday, Via Tania and T.Wilds

TEACHING & WORKSHOPS

Guest Instructor — Target Camp2006  &  2008

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA  ·  Invited international participant by Target

Invited to teach at Target Camp, a visual arts summer intensive at the University of Minnesota, providing access to professional arts education for underprivileged high school students. Bowers taught alongside a faculty of internationally recognised designers, including practitioners with experience at NASA and major European automotive design houses. Her selection as an international guest instructor reflects the regard in which her practice was held within design and arts communities at that time.

Workshop Facilitator2020 – 2023

Blue Mountains Cultural Centre

Designed and delivered public workshops in textile arts for community participants of varied skill levels. Programs included a Visible Mending workshop — exploring repair as both a practical skill and a conceptual act — and an Eco Dyeing workshop introducing natural dye processes using plant-based materials. Both programs drew on Bowers' sustained practice in textile arts and her Certificate IV in Training and Assessment.

Community Mending — Visible Mending Workshop

Wentworth Falls Art Festival

Public workshop in visible mending as community practice, bringing together participants to repair and rework garments collectively. The session framed mending as a social and ecological act as much as a textile skill.

MEDIA & METHODS

Drawing · Painting · Sculpture · Textile and fibre · Installation · Found object · Material assemblage · Songwriting · Recording · Experimental sound

Further documentation, exhibition images and audio recordings available on request.