Rowena Dykins lives on Big Cedar Lake in North Kawartha. She studied fine art in England as well as at Concordia University, The School of Art and Design at Montreal Museum of Fine Art and at John Abbot College. Since 1976, she has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Toronto, Montreal and throughout Durham region. In 1992 her work was featured in a solo exhibition, Ancient Shadows and Other Footprints, at the Robert Mclaughlin Gallery in Oshawa. In 1998 she participated in the Real McKay, curated by Margaret Rodgers and Carolyn Bell-Farrell and the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington. She was part of the Group Show titled Watershed at the Robert Maclaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, 2002. In this exhibition, Dykins mounted a major installation work that included actual limestone rock, oil paintings, and a full painted wall work. She has attended two Artist residencies, two on Toronto Island in 2010/2011, Ontario and the other in Pouch Cove, Newfoundland in 2005. Her most recent solo exhibitions took place in 2011 at The Art Gallery of Peterborough (Riparian) and in 2014 at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington (Resonance). Her works are in the collection of the Peterborough Art Gallery, the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, the Station Gallery and in numerous corporate and private collections in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. She teaches in the Durham Region and Peterborough.
Rowena Dykins is an abstract painter and installation artist who sets up dynamic fields for the viewer to enter. Her materials reflect an aesthetic deeply rooted in the natural history of the earth. Wandering, gathering and listening to nature’s rhythms are a constant source of inspiration. Dykins has created a geo-poetic beauty where paint, colour, purity of gesture and installations infuse the viewer with the power of nature’s energy. Abstraction becomes a language of the earth. From covering a gallery floor with salt to recreating a stone wall beneath a line of field paintings, this artist conjures nature as a living event.
