Nancy Bowen is a multimedia sculptor who combines a variety of materials in her works, including clay, glass, steel, and hair. Her sculpture explores the metaphors of the body and other organisms, and she attempts to create forms that cannot be easily named or located. “Visual experience for me is uniquely linked to the experience of inhabiting a body and perceiving the world through that vehicle,” Bowen says. “In this kind of haptic visuality, the eye functions almost as an organ of touch. I am interested in the physicality of the world and how perceptions of that world can be translated into a sculptural experience.” Bowen’s work is quirkily organic, often decorative, sensuous, and yet somehow alien. “My work weaves a decorative impulse into physical interpretations of various systems ranging from anatomy to Eastern religion,” Bowen observes. “The pieces look partly familiar because parts are familiar, while the context or format is not. I combine elements of a familiar ‘lived in’ world with the unknown visual world of the internal body.” Bowen enjoys using luscious, pretty materials, like glass beads, to draw viewers into her work and to invite them to participate in and explore it. Red Root and Running Cold are fairly straightforward pieces for her. Representing brains on top of beaded veins and arteries, these objects are part of her ongoing work with the body. By mixing anatomical forms with decorative art forms, Bowen aims to create a new genus of object—one that, in its strangeness and familiarity, is difficult to categorize, much less describe. For more information, see Daly Flanagan and Lynn Stein, 7 Degrees of Relativity, West Nyack, New York: Rockland Center for the Arts, 2006; and Nina Felshin, Figuring the Body: Nancy Bowen and Nancy Davidson, Middletown, Connecticut: Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University, 1998.