In Judith Cowan’s practice, the body is a tool; the mind a narrator.

 

Focusing on philosophical or phenomenological questions, Cowan draws on the potential of play and the absurd to disrupt established paths of cognition. Born in 1954, her artistic language developed in the early 1980s, in tandem with a generation of artists now associated with ‘New British Sculpture’. Although rooted in sculpture, Cowan’s work stands apart for its centrality of the body and for the desire to be fully immersed in material and space.

 

Cowan’s sculpture explores active and inactive space to alight on the residual margins of perceptive limits. ‘There is a feeling of place, and a feeling of the materials in my hand, and at the intersection of these are liminal spaces where a number of questions can be framed’, she has said. Often performative in derivation, her sculpture is open-ended and porous allowing space for variable interpretation. Influenced by the work of Arte Povera artists, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Morris and Joseph Beuys, a fascination with molecular structure can be traced in Cowan’s extensive use of materials including glass, metal, resin, plaster and fabric and in the register of her body through procedures of casting and moulding. In a footnote (2018), for example, a lick of the artist’s tongue forms a shape cast in glass, while the repetitive movement of her arm across the surface of wet clay results in the translucent green fibreglass and resin form of a tree (2018). Tested to capacity, materials become transformative, their haptic technology brought to attention, like the steel box in Observation Room (1998-2011), shot through by armour-piercing bullets or the two nickel-plated bronze torsos in Double Act (2018), a sculpture about ‘breathing and being alive’. Scale, too, becomes elastic, often un-relational to referent, dwarfing the audience to imbue subject matter with unequivocal intensity. Globes of Stuff (2012), produced after Cowan witnessed images of flood survivors in Pakistan, gathers her most personal possessions into a continuous line of fabric, cast into two vast, world-like forms, each denoting one, singular life.

 

For her films and installations, Cowan draws on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of liberated play in which actions can simply be ‘means without end’. In several, she becomes a flâneur, driven by a purposeful or purposeless meandering to welcome in chance and the unexpected, while in others, story-telling and chameleon-like personae drive her vision. Manifested in various ways, these threads are perhaps most visible in the expansive project Finnegan’s Teeth (2009), where images shot from the height of a dog create ‘a new type of image making’, or in the two films The Palace of Raw Dreams (2012) and Angelica (2013), captured from the perspective of stage puppets.

 

In Cowan’s work, nothing is as it seems to be. ‘It’s to do with being seen and not being seen, witnessing, and something being there without being witnessed. I am interested in bringing something into existence, catching it as opposed to defining it’, she has remarked.

 

Judith Cowan lives and works in London. She has received awards and prizes from the Henry Moore Foundation; the Elephant Trust; Rassegna Internazionale di Scultura Contemporanea, San Marino, Italy (prize-winner) and Gulbenkian Rome Scholarship, British School at Rome, Italy. She has exhibited internationally in the Czech Republic, Italy, Norway, Sharjah, and USA.