Lottie Cole: My Relation, Elizabeth Bowen

My Relation, Elizabeth Bowen by Lottie Cole brings a richly layered exhibition from Lottie Cole, inspired by the Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen, her circle, her vanished ancestral home Bowen’s Court, and the imaginative possibilities created by the accidents of coincidence and overlapping biographies. Grounded in a recent research road trip through Ireland, she travelled from Dublin to Cork, stopping at Doneraile Court and Farrahy Churchyard, where Bowen is buried, then on to Cork. 

 

 

The journey continued to Bantry and Durrus, where her own family is from. The route served as both geographical research and personal pilgrimage, tracing the faint lines between real heritage and imagined kinship. “Driving through County Carlow on my way to Cork City listening to characters in The Last September also heading to Cork felt like a beautiful immersion in the world I’ve been imagining” 

 

Although not related to Elizabeth Bowen, Lottie shares with her a surname [Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen], an alma mater, failed art college attendance, an Irish familial connection across Dublin and Cork, North London and the South of England, and the uncanny coincidence of being born only days after Bowen’s death. This work also reflects Cole's time working within the “literary-adjacent” world of the London Library, observing how pedigree, proximity, and perceived associations subtly shape cultural value. 

 

In the exhibition paintings vary from episodes in the life of Bowen or an imagined aspect of her work . Be it the moonlit front steps of Bowen’s Court on which so many literary discussions took place amongst her circle, to a painting of Bowen in conversation with Sylvia Plath, ‘borrowing’ the interiors of her artist friend Derek Hill, as well as a painting that depicts the view from the window of 2 Clarence Terrace, with a letter from her long-time lover Charles Ritchie recently read and lying opened on the bench. 

 

This show builds on Cole’s fascination with the narrative possibility of rooms. "Interiors are landscapes," Cole says, "but unlike the blousey vastness of the outdoors, these spaces hold our stories. We exist within them, defined and confined by them. They hold our past, present & future lightly, securely, but only for so long as we wish to be there.”