Jeny Howorth’s works of art are like time capsules. They hark back to a time when young people read and collected all sorts of magazines, ripped out the pictures and stuck them on to bedroom or study walls. Appropriating artwork, collecting and listening to music was a shared generational activity much as social media is today.
Howorth’s artistic North London upbringing provided early exposure to what was happening in British culture and she was encouraged to be creative. Later through her career she was surrounded by art directors, fashion editors and photographers and within this likeminded group achieved recognition as one of the most successful British supermodels of her generation. Alongside her professional work, Howorth was obsessively collecting images from books and magazines and she started to build the montages which capture her life, loves and influences.
The examples of collage, viewed in museum exhibitions, was appropriated into British pop art making and was a contemporary visual language. Pasting up your choices you freely join a tribe. It was an agreeable pastime for an internet-free youth who unwittingly would leap from an industrial world to electronic future, when house music exploded upon the night club scene. Howorth has taken that memory base and the behavior of a generation and immortalized it into these iconic, splendidly boxed collage works.
