From Clay

In order to create these works, Ben simulated a crowd by making a series of tiny sculptures to convey the idea and feeling of an assembly, without any attachment to an actual event.
After researching the most effective ways to depict a common figure, seven archetypes were designed, from which approximately 200 casts of the figures were made.
Stripped of any intimate character, the figures serve the purpose of icons or avatars: truncated representations of a whole, into which it is easy to project a notion of the self.
The dioramas were photographed and rendered in paint, using a technique that appears photographic from a distance, yet becomes more abstracted and painterly with proximity. Repetition, miniaturization, and fluctuations between representation and abstraction were used to activate links between the body, movement and memory.

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Ben Howe is an Australian artist born in London. Over the course of nearly two decades, he has explored the nature of consciousness, personal history and the incongruities of memory through his artwork, which has taken him to England, Germany, China and the USA.
He holds a Masters of fine art with distinction from RMIT and is the recipient of numerous grants, international residencies and fellowships.
Action, isolation and refraction surface as thematic currents in the practice of an artist whose work functions as a platform for broader considerations relating to the physical and subjective self within contemporary society.
Ben has developed a signature quasi scientific aesthetic that is at once hyper-realistic yet reductive. His at times stark and lonely works are often derived from preliminary explorations in other media such as sculpture, photography and film; his process distorting the boundaries of the real and the perceived.