Lowena Hearn for Glamcult #143

Within a few meters of Lowena Hearn’s vicinity, nothing can escape her touch. Every object, surface, and corner of her house carries the imprint of her hands: evidence of a lifelong impulse to create safety through beauty. Her artistry is hard to pinpoint in traditional terms: she paints, sculpts, and collects, but mostly she builds dream-like and deeply personal worlds within the walls she’s made her sanctuary – no matter which walls (as not even a rented Airbnb is spared).

She wrestles intimacy out of the inanimate by sharing a private language with her objects. The treasures she has found over the years “follow no clear reasoning behind their value,” she notes, “but sort of feel like missing pieces of me somehow.”

How does one deal with every object in your house speaking to you, like an entity, alive? “The only way to make it quiet enough to live/work in is to cut little pieces of my soul off and embed them into as many things that I interact with as I can.” That way, even when she feels at her lowest, the songs that her objects sing to her are able to soothe her.

Her relationship to objects is important, as there’s little distinction in her ‘named’ art and the things she finds and places around her. “What all art is after all, is a spell. When the artist says this is precious and meaningful, it becomes so, even if it’s little bits of trash. These objects are enchanted.” 

Naivety is central to her approach: nothing is “proper.” Everything is half-made, slightly wrong: perfection is alien, impersonal, repellent. Curtains are attached with bulldog clips for months. Knives are taken to things that feel too nice. The imperfect, well-worn, and slightly feral is where connection and meaning live. 

The materials she uses to elevate everything around her — wood, plaster, wax, bone, shells, textiles, and little touches of ornate decoration — feel “immortal”: humans have used these for millennia to make beauty, shelter, gods, and machines. They exist outside time and place, carrying their own worlds without tethering her to the past. 

When staying somewhere that doesn’t feel like her, Lowena edits the space into submission. “Carpet is one of my great enemies, I have been known to rip it up after having to live with it for a few months, as I find it soul destroying… Unless it also goes up the walls, that’s my exception — padded cell or cold hard floors and nothing else.”

Alongside her partner Jago she shares her world by hosting extravagant, chaotic, and tender dinner parties. “I think a lot of it came from just enjoying sharing this precious world, and a rebellion against this weird un-generousness that hit so many of our (rich/middle class) peers the moment they left home and had to buy cheese for themselves for the first time,” she notes.

“As I have often been too unwell to leave the house, the space I spend almost all my time in is more important than anything (especially when some of that time is spent in a state of being very unsure if I want to/can stay in this world). To be able to look around and feel inspired is the only way I know how to survive this life!” 

Her insistence on making her home a shared, sacred space (and perhaps not holding on to her past) is shaped by her childhood. “When I was a child, my mother and I were in and out of homelessness. I never experienced privacy or safety, so making my home feel so deeply mine, a sacred space, is very tied to this. My home becomes my chapel, and the objects I bring are like an offering.” 

The art of worldbuilding and connection is hard to simulate artificially. “Probably the most human thing about my work,” she reflects, “is how inseparable sadness and suffering are from the whole process — where the creation of beauty becomes more like compulsion, or survival, and is created both from and in spite of pain. Though I’m sure, given the opportunity, the people who own AI would jump at the chance to make their creation experience suffering, if it possibly means it could create more human-like content. The ‘divine’ will always look different to those who have actually seen hell.”