The paella of free expression, in Ctxt - Contexto y Acción, 03/03/2025
Lourdes Gomez
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“The British artist Judith Cowan questions the limits of debate in her work ‘Mouth to Mouth’, in which fifteen tongues gather, argue and exchange ideas inside a giant frying pan.”
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Judith Cowan (London, 1954) was inspired by Plato's captivating dialogue ‘The Symposium’ in designing ‘Mouth to Mouth’, an ambitious artistic project that she has just exhibited in her studio in Camden, north-west London. When conceptualising the piece, she visualised twenty or so human tongues arguing about creativity and contemporary society inside a huge paella held up by a lunar landing module of sorts. Nine years later, the frying pan spins and the vital organ of speech and rhetoric becomes a conduit for the British sculptor's exploration of the nature and boundaries of freedom of expression—issues that are even more pressing today. “Mouth to Mouth is my idea of a round table discussion, like Plato's ‘The Symposium’, where the swirl of ideas is the way to understand the present”, Cowan explains of her new installation.
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The debate simmers in the paella pan, which has a diameter of 150 centimetres and a polished aluminium surface with a mirror finish. Silicone casts of fifteen mouths, tongues out, and their respective jaws rest on the container waiting for the discussion to begin. The pieces vary in size and, as the sculptor reveals, come from art curators who have volunteered to participate in the project. The identity of the volunteers remains anonymous, at least for now.
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“The tongue has always been interesting to me because it's the part of the human body we use to speak and also part of the inner workings of the body. So I have always just been fascinated by the idea of the mouth and the tongue”, explains the London creator, heiress of Arte Povera and recognised exponent of the New British Sculpture movement that emerged in the 1980s. Cowan has incorporated her own tongue in previous works, such as in ‘a parachute jump’ 2018, and ‘The Sensation of Memory’ 2024.
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A couple of sudden movements mark the beginning of the dialogue between the protagonists of ‘Mouth to Mouth’. Mouths wag and twist in the frying pan in reaction to a soundtrack that Cowan has compiled of speeches and statements that have been broadcasted in open spaces. The viewer cannot hear the recording's content but observes its impact on the tongues, which erupt into a symphony of movements and noise despite their evident muteness. “It's a selection of a wide range of discussions that I’d like to participate in: confrontation, boundaries, tradition, courage, struggle, history. The topics include gun control, ideas and dreams, things that are real and not real, the idea of madness and alternative vision…”, she lists.
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All of a sudden, the intense reaction of the casts silences the interview. Vibrations and powerful trembles overcome the rotating paella as the debaters take to the floor and raise their voices. “They fight, they stop fighting, they separate, they swirl around on their own…and not all of the voices make it”, the artist explains, going on to question “is it possible to debate in today’s society? Debates are everything to me. We should allow for debate, but debates don’t always take place in the same forums. Here, they're stuck in the paella pan and they have to deal with it. However, it can also be very funny. You never know whose mouth is going to end up next to another”.
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In developing ‘Mouth to Mouth’, Cowan discovered that the rotating paella and, more so, the lunar table that supports the motors and audio of the work controls the installation. “The table and the paella pan are more in control than the tongues. They are like institutions! The institutions took over, and I found that scary. They all have a level of input into the conversation, but none have ultimate control”, she observes.
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In this way, she explains, the mouths interact in the symposium like puppets, which are always “constrained by the strings of the puppeteer”.
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A veil of secrecy shrouds the identities of the voices in the installation—speeches and interventions by public figures, including notorious politicians for whom she has no sympathy. “I didn't always agree with what was said. They weren’t always ideal conversations. But you can’t stop the storm around you and an artist has to try to see it to work with those conversations”. ‘Mouth to Mouth’ raises the quandary of the limits of free speech in the face of hate speech and other extremes.
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For Cowan, freedom of expression is the most burning issue today. “It is totally in danger. It's important to question it, ask ourselves if we have free speech, and confront the reality that it is under threat. We are looking at it Eurocentrically, with Eurocentric values, and I think that the powers of the world are moving in very different ways. It’s hard to be European at the moment. It's an incredibly dangerous time that we live in and the role of the artist is more important than ever. Our job as artists is to comment on the world, to say what we see, move through time and space, and act like philosophers or puppeteers back in the day by discussing ideas in a more everyday way” she argues.
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Memory and language, control and freedom, truth and fiction, precision and ambiguity, and traces of disinformation—all inspire this artist’s work. Moving across mediums, from sculpture and photography to drawing and audiovisual formats, she works with a range of materials. She feels closer to her mother’s Celtic-Scottish roots and her fathers’ Polish-Jewish roots than to her English birthplace, and defends the need to support art and nurture future artists.
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Her creative process is rooted in ideas, and as she explains, the material must find a way to embody them. Bringing to life the concept of tongues talking in an enormous frying pan has been a “hard, complicated and expensive challenge”—the first obstacle being the incompatibility of the traditional Valencian paella with the requirements for her artistic vision.
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“But if you're looking to get a pan spun, you don't think about ideas. You just think about what you require of that pan. I worked with an amazing team who helped bring those ideas to life in the right time”, she acknowledges. Among other specialists were welder and photographer Michael Sanders, leading production, and Adam Wright, animatronics and special effects designer.
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Translated by Paula Gurruchaga
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