Cowie often depicts utilitarian objects and vessels – teacups, saucers, jars, jugs – as carriers of meaning and symbolism. Many objects have appeared in Cowie’s work over several decades, to the extent that the artist has developed a kind of iconography or visual system based on these ‘core objects.’ Fractured milk jugs and Chinese ginger jars are loaded with associations of the environmental impact of the dairy industry and New Zealand’s trade economy. The surface of an upturned teacup is overlaid with the recognisable image of American painter Winslow Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field (1865), a work exemplifying that boundless tension between grief and hope. Another cup depicts an inverted bucolic landscape with a small stone foot bridge in the foreground, delicate light reflections bouncing off the imagined glossy surface, drawing attention to the inherent veracities of the rolling landscape and the artifice of painting itself. Here, these everyday objects of domesticity become new vessels, baring the load of another everyday reality; that ever-looming threat of climate change and economic collapse.
