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

 

Born in 1954, her artistic language emerged during the early 1980s in tandem with a generation of artists associated with ‘New British Sculpture’. Although rooted in sculpture, Cowan’s work stands apart for its centrality of the body and desire to be fully immersed in material and space. Immersion is a characteristic quality of her practice, resulting from an interest in the transformative potential of matter and in chameleon-like personas, both methodologies that open up new perspectives and other points of view.

 

Embedded in materiality, 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. The resonance of her forms arise from their tension within space, between felt, architectonic limits and the work’s “haptic technology” – forces such as sound, light or pressure which alter and shift. Frequently performative in derivation, they are open-ended and porous allowing space for variable interpretation. This quality of ‘anti-symbolism’ is drawn in part from Giorgio Agamben’s notion of liberated play in which actions can simply be ‘means without end’. For several works, Cowan adopts the role of a modern flâneur, driven by a purposeful or purposeless meandering that yields surprising and unexpected results. Manifested in various ways, it is 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 Palace of Raw Dreams (2012) and Angelica (2013) both captured from the perspective of stage puppets.

 

Part of a generation of artists that re-invested in formalism after the de-materiality of conceptualism, influenced by the work of Arte Povera artists, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Morris and Joseph Beuys, Cowan invokes the body in her sculpture through casting and moulding. In a footnote (2018), she uses a lick of her tongue to form a shape cast in glass, while the movement of her arm across the surface of wet clay results in a tree (2018), a large-scale, translucent green fibreglass and resin form. “I work with the breaking points, capacity or limits of materials” she says. A fascination with molecular structure can be traced through the extensive range of materials she employs, including glass, metal and plaster, as well as the more randomly behaved mediums of film, fabric and collage. Tested to capacity, materials become transformative, 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 the artist 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 a register of one, singular life.

 

In Cowan’s work, “nothing is as it seems to be”. Enacting a material metamorphosis, playfulness and humour are brought to bear on the passage of time. The transient moment, often evoked in her works through movement, breath or sound, is captured and preserved through casting, enveloping, filming or photographing, each a gesture against oblivion.

 

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.