Barbara Howey has been making work on environmental issues including fracking and water pollution since 2017. Barbara is a painter and her current body of work is based on plants.

We are dependent upon plants

Painting nature has a renewed relevance today in the light of climate change and biodiversity loss. Plants are extraordinary in that they provide the air we breathe and the food we eat and we are utterly dependant on them and yet we seem blind to this and continue to poison, pollute and deforest what once was abundant and diverse.

Between representation and abstraction

Barbara Howey’s work references plants but also reimagines them through the process of gestural marks and heightened colour made directly wet into wet to create a space which slides between representation and abstraction and back again. Whilst the references are strongly related to the observable plant world the work is just as much about self-expression and the nature of painting
itself.

Barbara Howey’s first degree was in painting at Leicester Polytechnic in 1991 her MA was in Feminism in the Visual Arts at Leeds University in 1992. She completed a practice-based PhD in 2001 at Norwich University of the Arts. She has shown Nationally and Internationally, in the John Moores Prize and is a member of Contemporary British Painting.

Entwined – Plants in Contemporary Painting

Barbara Howey’s work was included in the exhibition on the Conference Land2 at the University of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam in 2017 and in Colour In Nature: from Pattern to Poison at GroundWork Gallery, 2018. In 2022-2023 she co-curated with the late Dr Judith Tucker a touring exhibition; Entwined – Plants in Contemporary Painting, and Plant Power for GroundWork Gallery in Kings’ Lynn in 2025, in which she has also exhibited

“GroundWork Gallery is unique in its focus on art and the environment and I welcome the debates that have come out of this space and I see the NetWork as an ongoing dialogue with these debates and with other artists.”