BIO

Joanna Towers is a visual artist whose practice draws on a longstanding connection with landscape, wildlife and the natural environment. Born in Tanzania, she moved to the UK in 1969 and grew up in rural South East England. Now based in Kent, she works across painting, drawing and sculpture.

Beginning with figurative painting grounded in close observation, her work has increasingly moved towards exploring how places are experienced, remembered and transformed through artistic processes. Rather than seeking only to represent what is seen, she is interested in how memory, materials and the act of making can reveal different ways of understanding a place.

Her current MA Fine Art studies are informing an increasingly experimental approach, in which the ideas behind a work, its material development and its eventual presentation are considered together. She is interested in how artworks communicate beyond their individual subjects, and how their relationships to one another, to the spaces they occupy and to those who encounter them can open up different interpretations.

Observation and drawing remain important starting points. Working with charcoal, graphite, ink and pencil, she develops studies that may inform larger paintings in oil, acrylic and pastel. Layering, glazing and textured surfaces have been characteristic of her painting, while her developing practice is opening up new possibilities for materials, processes and forms of expression.

Her earlier work includes still-life paintings of everyday objects and landscapes drawn from places across the UK and southern Europe. Often characterised by loose brushwork, strong tonal contrasts and an interest in light and atmosphere, these works reflect her engagement with the visible world. Increasingly, however, it is the experience of encountering a place, and the memories, associations and questions that remain afterwards, that inform the direction of her work.