Femme de Rocher, bronze edition 6 (cast from bronze) 1994, 50.8 x 63.5 x 25.5 cm

Dawn Rowland FRSS

British, b. 1944

Since picking up her chisel in 1975, London-born sculptor Dawn Rowland has spent more than fifty years coaxing feeling out of stone.

Her journey has taken her from San Francisco to Manchester and back to London, where she lives and works today. Stone is her first love, carved by hand into forms that seem to breathe, but she moves just as fluently through bronze, wood, terracotta, plaster and silver. Her drawings are no mere sketches: they are a vital part of her artistic language, as expressive and considered as the sculptures themselves.

At the heart of Rowland's work lies a tender, urgent question: how do we hold on to one another? Her sculptures explore the fragile, interdependent bonds between people, and the pull between harmony and conflict as those bonds meet the world around us. She draws deeply on her own life and emotional experience, yet the result is anything but private. As Rowland herself insists, the feelings her work speaks to belong to all of us, whatever our gender, race or place in the world.

We are thrilled to present Dawn Rowland as the very first exhibition in our new gallery space on Duke Street, Mayfair, running from 1 October to 26 November. There could be no better way to open our doors than with an artist whose work speaks so powerfully to what connects us all.

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