“My sculptural work is intended to sit before the drawings as a further exploration of the boundaries between classical two-dimensional planes and their three-dimensional counterparts. I sculpt my figures to have an ideal viewing position — that from which the camera would view them. The angle we are presented with as viewers in a cinema.” - Nina Mae Fowler.

The series I Wake Up Screaming is composed of five drawings, each with an ornamental sculpture displayed in front it. With each individual pair depicting the same subject in variant terms, Fowler creates a sense of infinite regression — the same thing that happens when a camera films a screen showing its own image. The technique of juxtaposing two- and three-dimensional works, also employed in A Real Allegory, fuses together the artist’s two main practices. In this series Fowler returns to the subject of Carole Landis, the forgotten Hollywood star also depicted in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The five images of Landis are taken from a variety of sources, including publicity shots, film stills and candid backstage photographs. Fowler refers to the sculpted elements as her Bozzetti, from the Italian for ‘sketch’. Conceived in the round and finished in painted aluminium, the front surfaces of the sculptures are executed with meticulous precision, appearing to mirror the drawings of Landis in every particular. As the viewer moves between the drawing and sculpture, the three-dimensional representation dissolves into a raw, unrendered clay surface.

Here the materiality of the work serves to illuminate the drama of surface and depth incorporated in its subject. When looking from the front, we are presented with the essence of Hollywood idealism, but as we intervene in the space between the images, the unmoulded clay comes to represent the darker underbelly of fame and fortune — the scandal, gossip and speculation that dogged Landis’s career. These works are also testament to Fowler’s early artistic influences like Michelangelo’s Dying Slave and Rodin’s Eternal Idol: Fowler has imbued in her Bozzetti a similarly fragmented beauty, emerging from the ruggedness of material form. The drawings in the series are hung from eyelets and nails. A trademark of Fowler’s, this process grants them a sculptural presence in their own right, imbuing the work with a sense of smothered violence and alluding to the fragility behind glitz and glamour.

Extending her critique of the machinery of Hollywood stardom, Fowler replicates Landis’s image by producing the Bozzetti as an edition — imitating the merchandised idolisation of an icon, and the sense of isolation that it generates. The sculptures are also deliberately modest in scale. As the artist explains: “The scale of the work is reminiscent of ornamental, deco figurines — a souvenir to mount on the fireplace or add to your collection.”