Transit shelter public art by Marcus Bowcott

Marcus Bowcott studied drawing, painting, and media at the Ontario College of Art in the late 1970s and later enrolled at the Royal College of Art, graduating with an MA from the RCA School of Painting in 1984.

His paintings and sculptures often focus on human activity in relation to the natural environment. He sometimes uses irony and humour to remind viewers of our culture's conflicted relationship to nature and technology, and how our technological society continues to organize itself through myths, rituals, monuments, and structures of reverence, even when they now appear in industrial or consumer form.

Recently he has been developing paintings and sculptures that present luxury status symbols, such as BMW Art Cars, stacked 1 on top of another in relation to ancient symbols of nature.

Marcus taught drawing, painting, and colour in Vancouver-area colleges and universities over a period of 35 years. He encouraged students to question historical and contemporary methods of representation in relation to personal, intrinsic thoughts, and feelings. He also encouraged students to consider how our senses relating to balance, proprioception, and vision underpin widely accepted conventions and concepts of layout, design, composition, and colour.

He lives in North Vancouver, BC, with his wife and sculpture partner, Helene Aspinall. Helene and Marcus enjoy living close to the lush mountain rainforest and the Salish Sea.

My work examines how perceptual and symbolic representations persist within contemporary life.

I'm interested in how we have inherited and translated systems of meaning rather than replace them outright; how technological society continues to organize itself through myths, rituals, monuments, and structures of reverence, even when these now appear in industrial or consumer form.

Much of my practice explores this continuity through the tensions between the natural and the manufactured. Forests, trees, and organic forms are placed in direct relation to industry, automobiles, and industrial debris. These placements are not intended as simple oppositions between nature and technology, but as evidence of their entanglement.

The automobile, for example, functions not only as a machine but as a contemporary ritual object, emblematic of freedom, identity, mobility, and aspiration, much as forests, rivers, and oceans historically served as symbolic structures through which societies understood relation, power, and transcendence. Stacked, immobilized, or displaced, these objects begin to resemble monuments of the very systems that once promised to liberate us.

Across both 2D and 3D media, I approach my work as a study and expression of the myths that organize modern life and the historical structures that continue to shape us beneath the surface of contemporary culture.