Blue Chintz

As a kind of stalking horse for his inventive decoration, Bowers uses familiar forms – chargers, cups and saucers, vases, Staffordshire ornaments. Apart from the latter, they are useful and practical domestic shapes. What Bowers often does with the form is to modify it – usually by enlargement, sometimes dramatically so. This magnification has the strange effect of creating a disconnect from the original while also implying that the object is to be looked at through a lens of aesthetic history. When he does adhere to original scale, the richness of decoration and jewel-like detail seem to make the work larger than it really is.