IN/HIBITED

This page brings together works that mark significant moments in the development of the practice.

Spanning different periods, materials, and forms, they share a common function: each opened a question, altered a direction, or revealed a structure that would continue to unfold elsewhere. Some stand apart from established bodies of work. Others contain, in concentrated form, concerns that later expanded across multiple projects.

Neither preliminary nor peripheral. These are works through which the practice became visible to itself.

2021

WE ARE TIME to be human

Written in parallel with my visual practice, this novel explores attention, ambiguity, and the forms through which a human being becomes present to themselves and others. Rather than offering answers, it remains with questions of perception, relation, and the experience of being in time.

Further information and excerpts can be found on the dedicated project page or press the image:

2012–2015

(co)ORDINATED COPYRIGHTS

This series operate as a sustained investigation into ownership, authorship, and the construction of subjectivity through borrowed forms. The title itself performs a double movement. "Copyright" invokes legal protection, originality, and claims of possession; "coordinated" invokes geometry, mapping, and systems of relation. Together they suggest that identity is never singular but assembled through coordinates – historical, cultural, and symbolic.

Across the series, images are arranged along a persistent vertical axis. Geometric diagrams occupy the upper register, garments and bodies the centre, while chemical or textual formulations appear below. The works read less as collages than as propositions: systems through which bodies become legible and culture organises itself.

Further information and excerpts can be found on the dedicated project page or press the images:

2002-2009

YEARS

This period unfolded largely outside exhibition structures. While large-scale installation work receded, artistic inquiry continued through drawings, notebooks, ink works on paper, and material experiments developed alongside everyday life and the raising of children.

These years brought a fundamental shift in the experience of time, labour, repetition, and attention. Rather than constituting a break in the practice, they altered its conditions. Many works from this period remain dispersed, archived, or are only now being rediscovered and added to LAB WORK.

The raising of children was itself a profound creative undertaking, reshaping both life and the circumstances under which art could be made. Artistic thinking persisted in smaller and more intimate formats, where questions of emotional space, structure, materiality, and relation continued to evolve.

From around 2007 onwards, the first felt grids began to emerge, introducing a language of seriality, accumulation, and textile structure that would become central to later work.

LAB WORK gathers these studies, fragments, and transitional works as part of a continuous artistic trajectory in which finished works and preliminary investigations coexist.

©️ Camilla Howalt

2002

PARTING

Installation

Felt / Concrete / Perspex / Raw Sheep Wool / Gloss Household Paint

6 × 5 m

Juxtaposition forms the foundation for the formal and emotional relationships between materials and the choreographed arrangement of objects. This project concerns emotional breathing spaces – or the lack of them. What unfolds in the surrounding space is a fragmented externalization of the figure’s emotional reality, where the Other is experienced as outside oneself rather than within. In this way, the Other becomes a kind of roadmap, carrying both projection and desire, pointing toward the possibility of awareness.

The figure itself is majestic and faceless, suspended in a straightjacket dress that hovers like a wedding gown – a presence at once solemn and constrained. Around it, adjoining structures echo this tension: cube-shaped forms in solid concrete float upon cylinder-shaped perspex rings; quadrant frames are cut open, through which raw sheep’s wool, spiders, and all that once lived from the sheep spill downward like gashes or waterfalls. The wall behind holds an impenetrable yellow square painted in dense gloss household paint, creeping slightly around the corner to invite a sense of immersion.

Breathing spaces here are dense, congested, and exploited. The figure appears sealed off, existing only within itself, and this stalled existence reverberates outward, mirrored in the density and overflow of materials. A fragile balance is maintained, as if the viewer were suspended inside a still image taken from a moving camera.

©️ Camilla Howalt

2001

DERIVATION

Installation

2 x wall to wall carpet in ivory & steel grey / Cotton string / Felt / Red House hold paint / MDF / Photography / Electrical light bulb / Audio scape

2 rooms of app 5 × 5 m

By enforcing the combination of several elements within one piece, I have looked to artists in various fields. To name a few: Tadao Ando, the Japanese architect, whose architecture offers serenity and a stillness that I myself seek and long for within art and life, has inspired my thinking about placement and the juxtaposition of otherwise abstracted objects. At the other end of the emotional scale, Rainer Maria Rilke, the German poet who wrote the Duino Elegies, gave me a sense of courage to explore the nature of emotional implosion.

Derivation is comprised of three main elements divided between two rooms. In the first room, one enters a space illuminated in red light, created by the backside of a carpet painted deep red and hung one metre inside the installation entrance, creating a corridor through which the viewer must pass. Upon entering the space, the viewer encounters the back of a solitary life-size female figure made of white felt. What first appeared to be a hanging red carpet is now seen from the other side: a cream-coloured carpet through which thousands of strings are sewn.

In the second room, one sees a wooden construction in the shape of an upright rooftop standing on the floor beside a square box. The box, leaning and balancing on one edge of one of the roof trusses, is placed centre stage, also with its back turned to the viewer. Both the box and the rooftop are shrouded on the inside in black granite-grey carpet, except for the floor, upon which lies an enlarged photograph of a neutral face with closed eyes beneath water. When the viewer stands in the room looking into the box, the wooden construction is framed by a red square painted onto the wall in the opposite corner, reciprocating the size and backside colour of the carpet in the first installation room.

Both materials and concepts connect the pieces, as each occupies the home of intimacy, the area of the floor, and the relations between these. The thematic concern of the work is based on an internal sense of emotional space, touching on the idea of a pre-existing and somehow innate emptiness sometimes experienced within existence, sometimes lying dormant like the photograph beneath the water.

By placing the work in two installation rooms – divided yet connected – I hoped to enable an experience that would operate laterally and evoke associative thinking in the viewer.

2001

NESTED WEIGHT 3/3

𝑺𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒍 𝑺𝒄𝒖𝒍𝒑𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆

Bronze / Fishing Thread (70-100 Denier)

Diameter of 40 mm

Three hand-polished bronze spheres, each stamped with serial numbers and initials, tightly wrapped in lengths of fine, translucent fishing thread (70–100 denier). At first glance, they appear delicate - like small nests or cocoons, barely there. But when held, their unexpected weight interrupts the illusion.

Made to be touched, not just seen, these intimate sculptures stage a quiet conflict between perception and sensation. What seems soft is dense. What looks fragile is solid. The thread does not cradle but cocoons - an act of containment as much as concealment. Beneath the apparent chaos of the thread’s layers lies a hidden structure, revealing an underlying order in what might first appear tangled or disorderly.

Each sphere is held in different private collections in England.