Judith Cowan was born in London, where she currently lives and works. She completed her BA in sculpture at Sheffield Polytechnic, before returning to London to undertake an MA in Sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art. Cowan then spent a year abroad at the British School at Rome on the Gulbenkian Rome Scholarship. Much of Cowan's work involves the negotiation of different states, regarding both form and content, outward appearance and internal subjectivity or narrative. In this sense, her practice as a sculptor is not just about the making of an object, but rather…
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Judith Cowan was born in London, where she currently lives and works. She completed her BA in sculpture at Sheffield Polytechnic, before returning to London to undertake an MA in Sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art. Cowan then spent a year abroad at the British School at Rome on the Gulbenkian Rome Scholarship.
Much of Cowan's work involves the negotiation of different states, regarding both form and content, outward appearance and internal subjectivity or narrative. In this sense, her practice as a sculptor is not just about the making of an object, but rather deals with "pieces of space": insides and outsides, voids and contours. This appears throughout the artist's practice in a variety of manifestations regarding specific media as well as broader thematic preoccupations.
In the large-scale and multi-part work, Finnegan's Teeth, Cowan dealt with the notions of perspective, gaze, narrative, and physical sensation by inhabiting and reconstructing an animal's point of view: an imagination of the King's Cross area of London as traversed and experienced through her dog, Finnegan. The result included a publication, a series of photographs and a number of site-specific installations that aimed to present an unpredictable and amorphous narrative, one that is fluid and fragmented, never singular but comprised of a variety of voices and tropes.
This interest in a sense of hybridity can be seen in the artist's more object-based sculptural practice. In each case, as with Touching Earth and Sky, material acts as a point of departure from which to explore the ambiguities of form and space, presence and absence. For Cowan, the formal is often the beginning of a playful, subversive and open-ended relationship with the idea of transformation, of mediating states to straddle the real and the illusory, the everyday and the dream.
Judith Cowan's work has been included in group exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery, the Serpentine Gallery and abroad in Italy, Norway, Czech Republic and USA. She has had solo exhibitions at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Camden Arts Centre, Kettle's Yard, Angel Row Gallery, and in Italy at Studio Stefania Miscetti, Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea and Erica Fiorentini Gallery, Rome. Recent projects have included group shows at the Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, Rugby, the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and the Tina B Festival in Prague.
