Judith Cowan: Sculptures of Silence, in Meer, 27/10/2025, Claudia Zanfi
Judith Cowan’s studio exhibition The Unseen Drawings features a wide selection of previously unseen works on paper, created over the past thirty years. Drawings, objects, and works, detached from their original context, take on new meaning as testimonies of the contemporary. Emerging from silence, they inhabit the space, allowing the line of memory to carry with it floating places and sensations. These unpublished drawings are shaped both by a sense of presence and by forgetting. After all, language itself is born from silence.
Judith Cowan’s cultural roots reach far and belong to various parts of Europe—from her father’s Polish/Russian heritage to her mother’s Scottish —a mix of cultures that has undoubtedly influenced the sense of mobility and multiplicity within her work. The city of London itself is often reinterpreted as a “port,” a place of exchange and passage. Along the canals of Camden Town, not far from Judith’s home-studio, some of the research that has marked the artist’s work has taken place.
One example of this is Finnegan’s Teeth, filmed through the diverse landscapes encountered along the city’s canals and open spaces, all from the unusual perspective of an animal. Finnegan, in fact, was the artist’s young dog. Over the course of a year, images and photographs were collected—a kind of visual diary of walks in the King’s Cross area, in north London. What makes this work particularly unique is the reversal of perspective, where everything—from blades of grass to the wheels of a bicycle—is observed at a dog’s eye level.
[...] In her creative journey, gestures and the traces left behind by our bodies are highly significant. This is evident in works like Mouth to Mouth, in which tongues cast from various international curators are placed on a large rocking metal structure and set vibrating. The piece evokes the Babel of language and the sometimes deafening confusion that arises in the dialogue between individuals, cultures, and different forms of art.
Memory and language are the solid, silent—sometimes unpredictable—foundations of Judith Cowan’s artistic practice. Here, stone, wood, wind, and roots are essential elements, whilst blue, green, and ochre are the dominant colours. A strong sense of tactility and material presence distinguishes her creations whether photographs, installations, sculptures, or drawings. Another element characterizing her work is her interest in rituals connected to the earth, to seasonality, and to craft traditions.
Transmuting ideas, concepts, and visions into plastic and material forms is a continuous challenge that transcends the boundaries of time and space.
Translated by Barbara Martorelli.
https://www.meer.com/it/99386-judith-cowan-sculture-del-silenzio