Cecil Howell.

Artist in Residence at Napeague

Medium: Drawing

Year: Ongoing​

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Cecil Howell is an artist and landscape architect whose work explores how we perceive and understand the landscape. During her residency at Napeague, she is continuing to develop a series of drawings focused on the ground beneath our feet. The downward-looking perspective—commonly associated with maps, aerial photography, and satellite imagery—reflects a contemporary shift in orientation from the horizontal to the vertical.

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Yet these drawings depict moments so small and seemingly insignificant that they would never appear on a map. At this intimate scale, a strand of seaweed becomes a cliff, and a hole in the sand becomes a crater. The work destabilizes our sense of perspective: are we looking through human eyes, from the vantage point of a seagull, or from a satellite 8,000 miles above the Earth? By blurring these points of view, the drawings challenge how we locate ourselves within the landscape and how scale shapes perception.

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