2016 marked a pivotal year in Howe’s engagement with the political as personal, and the personal as collectively owned memory began to form as a seed of their practice. Among many seminal events which would lead to their family’s eventual relocation to London in August 2020 was a marked uptick in gun violence in the United States, especially against children and the LGBTQIA+ community. Initially painted in response to her own numbness and sense of impotency as the US Government continued to “send thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families” of gun violence, the phrase “thoughts and prayers” echoed then as it does now with the increasing hollowness of abandonment of those who are tasked with keeping citizens safe – the abdication of responsibility modeled from the top down, creating social conditions in which, taking clues from our leaders, we tick the box of “sending a thought,” but never really reflect on that thought, why it needs to exist, and to whom we are sending it.

In 2019, Howe was one of four artists invited to create work for the CORE climate project in collaboration with AirInk (https://air-ink.com/) and Graviky Labs (https://www.graviky.com/) (an M.I.T. research incubator). Howe’s piece, Undamaged Destiny, created out of ink made from particulate pollution was shown solo at the Aspen Art Museum from 2019 – 2020 and is now held in private collection. Connecting with the Graviky Labs team more deeply enabled Howe to obtain source samples of the collected pollution which the company uses to produce its black ink products.

After working with the processed ink product for Undamaged Destiny, Howe was eager to put her hands physically in and on something tangible: the particulate pollution itself held the unique odor of the city from which it was collected. Working directly with her hands and a muddle of pollution and water, Howe searched for source images which embed the narrative that sending prayers also sends hope, healing, or any sort of concrete help.

Thoughts (After Rubens) is found in Ruben’s 1610 painting The Massacre of the Innocents and depicts the face of a mother, upturned in horror as she beholds, impotent, her child at the mercy of the Roman soldier. The right-hand panel of Howe’s work Prayers (After Rubens) is a mirrored version of the face of Mary from Ruben’s 1612 work The Entombment as she looks to the heavens while holding and mourning her murdered son.

These works are incredibly delicate and do not come out of storage very often, as such, we offer them at the New Year for viewing in the hopes that all of us can reach one step past thoughts and prayers as we look towards the kind of world we’d like to inhabit in the new year and beyond, here at home in Britain, in our estranged home of the US, in the torn apart streets of Iran, Ukraine, and everywhere else Subjugation of the Other and Holding on to Power is the prescribed order.