Imogen Eve Rowe
Artist Profile
Imogen Eve Rowe paints watercolours of gardens. And a few other things that take her fancy. Her work explores themes of community, belonging, and identity through an observational practice. Rowe’s most recent body of work is of large-scale watercolours on Yupo featuring local subtropical front yards. Fascinated by personal histories and aging, Rowe chooses gardens often tended by the elderly, giving her work a pre-emptive, quasi-archival quality. Rowe believes these spaces can hint at identity and tell life stories. These public-facing private-areas hold productivity, spirituality, culture and politics. She has been a finalist in a number of awards including the Dobell Drawing Prize (2025), the Salon des Refusés (2024), the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award (2020, 2021, 2022, 2025), FLOW: The Biennial National Contemporary Watercolour Prize (2019, 2021, 2023), and the Greenway Art Prize (2016, 2021, 2022). In 2024, she won first prize in the BFA Category of the National Art School Library Artists’ Book Award.
When my kids were really little, I felt my world had contracted. This doesn’t happen for all mothers, but for me, with three babies in three years, the exhaustion and the logistics confined me to my local neighbourhood.
Walks often punctuated our days. I found myself obsessing how my children would relate to the natural world. What plants would pepper their memories?
Observing the front yards of the Inner West, these often tiny patches of public-facing private property, I would find wonder. Filled with subtropical splendour these sometimes messy, sometimes manicured spaces are a vital connection to not only nature, but also productivity, spirituality, culture and politics. A necessary, undercelebrated relief in the urban environment. A joy.
Artist Statement - Imogen Eve Rowe
