POPPY
COWAN
My practice explores how memory, identity and personal histories persist through material, place and the senses. Working primarily with ceramics and scent, I create vessels that hold traces of lived experience, exploring how connections to people and places continue to shape us long after they have changed or disappeared.
Family, cultural memory and inheritance are central to my work. I am interested in the things we carry forward, often unconsciously: the landscapes we associate with home, the sensory details attached to loved ones, and the fragments of experience that become part of our own identities. Through my work, I consider how these traces are transformed as they pass through memory, material and time.
Ceramics offers a means of preserving these traces physically, while scent holds something more fleeting and elusive. Scent can evoke an intimate memory with remarkable immediacy; however, it cannot be held indefinitely. By bringing these contrasting materials together, I explore the tension between what survives and what changes, and how something of a person can continue to resonate beyond their physical presence.
Through my practice, I explore the contradiction between permanence and ephemerality in relation to memory, grief and loss. I explore how memories can be held, contained, transformed and re-experienced.
Exhibitions/ Publications:
☆ October 2026 - Group Exhibition, Oasis Gallery, London, UK - The Art Of Endings.
☆ September 2026 - Group Exhibition, Waloha, Rotterdam, NL - GRAW.
☆ July 2026 - Group Exhibition, C3 Studios, Rotterdam, NL - WDKA Graduation Exhibition.
☆ May 2024 - Group Exhibition, Stukafest, Groningen, NL.
☆ December 2023 - Group Exhibition, Worm, Rotterdam, NL - The Volume of Time.
☆ May 2023 - Group Exhibition, Sprout Studios, Rotterdam, NL.
☆ February 2021 - Group Publication, Art and Type Magazine, New York, USA.