Negative Dialectics in the Play of Nature and Culture: Homophones and Artistic Presence

ArtBlog

Jun 28

In this reflective piece, Camilla Howalt explores the fertile tensions between nature and culture through the lens of Adorno’s negative dialectics. Using homophones like llama/lama, monk/mink, and otter/other, she reveals subtle poetic gaps where presence emerges not from resolution but from paradox. Through grids, fruit, and symbolic interplay, the text invites us into spaces where the natural and the cultural, the sensual and the ascetic, co-exist in unresolved, generative tension.

Camilla Howalt

Visual Artist

After graduating with First-Class Honours from Wimbledon School of Art and completing an MA at Kingston University’s Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Camilla Howalt (b.1968) established her Malmö-based studio in 2021. Her practice focuses on creating prints and original artworks that blend photography, painting, and digital techniques.

Working across painting, textile-based media, and photography to explore perception, materiality, and fragmentation, her work traces the ways pain - physical, emotional, existential - inscribes itself onto surfaces, bodies, and spaces. Through mapped and layered textures, she investigates how presence unfolds in the tension between sensuality, introspection, and abstraction.

Camilla’s work is part of private collections across Europe, and her prints are available for purchase, bringing her distinct, contemplative style into homes and spaces looking for both aesthetic and thoughtful engagement.

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