ARTIST STATEMENT

As an artist, I transform the female body into furniture through the representation of hair: a symbol of inheritance, I examine how relationships reinforce rigid expectations of the female body as a site of labor, fecundity, and endurance. The familiarity and stagnant nature of furniture further situate the work within cycles of class, poverty, and generational trauma. In my paintings, hair functions as a recurring metaphor for these pressures, Figures are rendered in bold color and expressive brushwork, often balancing between abstraction and representation.

When identity is reduced to survival, empathy erodes and moral frameworks collapse into instinct, shaped by economic precarity making pleasure currency. This begins to function as a temporary escape in environments that offer little structural relief. While our culture promotes individualism, it simultaneously reinforces ideals of togetherness, family, and romantic fulfillment. For many with working and lower class communities, love and relationships become one of the few accessible forms of meaning, even as they reproduce the very structures that limit autonomy. 

BIOGRAPHY

Cascade Howe (b. 2001, Portland, Oregon) is an oil painter and interdisciplinary artist pursuing a BFA in Painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her work explores identity, family, and the emotional weight of lived experience, reflecting on how the chaos and tenderness of our pasts shape who we become. Beyond her paintings she brings together materials that don’t naturally belong, finding a balance between structure and vulnerability that mirrors the relationships and tensions she examines.