The art and writing both have a collagistic bent. I work with pretty much whatever media I can get my hands on so long as I can cut, tear, glue, scribble, draw, paint, spray, pour, and sprinkle. Sampling, remixing, and layering are the go-to methods. I’m drawn to found and vintage materials: flea market ephemera, discarded library books, antique photos, old clothes, unearthed text. The tools I use typically use are inks, watercolors, acrylics, oil stick, glue, and more recently natural pigments, ash, dirt. Even when I occasionally play with digital composites I privilege blending my photos of my art, photography, and old children’s drawings. Maintaining a spirit of intuitive and spontaneous play, feeding a desire to be always surprised by unexpected results.*

A few themes percolate throughout. The mysterious, fickle nature of memory; solastalgia and the Anthropocene; the cosmos as a metaphor for the imagination. Throughout it all there's an ongoing itch to engage with the the flow of lost things via the mutation, morphing, and recombining of the remnants, and revenants, of one's physical and private world. Each series tends to sprout some new germ of an idea that triggers the next, and so each grouping of work is in some way connected to the previous. This begets that, that begets this.

As for the writing, the publications include fabulist fictions, experimental poetry, memoir/ family biography, and academic research on writing pedagogy, arts-based research, and sustainability as a pedagogical ethic. I teach full-time at St. John's University, NY, and conduct workshops at the Art League of Long Island. I have an MA and Doctor of Arts from University at Albany, and an MFA from Transart Institute/Plymouth University. I live on Long Island, New York.

contact@derekowens.net

• Ellizabeth Grosz’s take is one I identify with. Her essay “Art and the Animal” is worth a read:

‍ ‍ Art is of the animal. It comes not from something uniquely human – reason, recognition, intelligence, or sensibility – nor from any of man’s higher accomplishments – a special inclination to the aesthetic or the ethical, to beauty or goodness – but from something excessive in the world, from what is unable to be predicted, from the animal. What is most artistic in us is also the most bestial. Art comes from that excess, in the world, in objects, in living things, which enables them to be more than they are, to give more than themselves, their material properties and possible uses, than is readily given in them. Art is the consequence of that excess, that energy or force, that puts life at risk for the sake of intensification, for the sake of sensation itself – not simply for pleasure or for sexuality, as psychoanalysis might suggest – but for what can be magnified, intensified, for what is more, what is perhaps too much, but through which creation, risk, innovation are undertaken for their own sake.