Rowell’s new series of mosaic works looks at emerging cultures and behaviours within the internet space whilst also commenting on the importance of archiving events within the internet's history. For each of the pieces in the series, the artist has been taking inspiration from trending comments, tweets or memes that you can find on various social media platforms; these vary from comical, to weird, to alarming!

Of most interest to Rowell is the relatively new concept of ‘trending’; memes and so on only seem to be popular for a short period of time, perhaps a couple of months at best, before they are then replaced with the next ‘trending’ comment or meme to copy and paste.

For Rowell, this temporal popularity is indicative of the way in which we use social media in particular. We are constantly updating and refreshing and posting, we build layer upon layer of information; and for Rowell, by digging back down through the history of our feeds, the artist wants to capture these strange and forgotten moments. The idea to recreate them as mosaics plays on the idea of the works being almost archaeological.

“There are similarities when you start searching through the forgotten detritus of social media feeds, to digging up the earth and discovering some ancient artefact. I feel like we are living through this rapid age of expanding technological capability, and that is understandably having an impact on our behaviour as a species. My concern is that these developments are so present and rapid, that we are not stopping to consider the resulting changes to our behaviours. I want these pieces to reflect what it truly means to take a step back and begin to consider what is happening within the internet space, and how it is affecting us. This process is highly archival, I feel compelled to find internet content and make it physical and permanent for fear of it getting lost altogether.”