Artist’s Statement

Jules Cowan

Freud believed that artists indulge themselves in an imaginary world. Without a doubt, many of us begin at a time when imagination is not an indulgence, but the mechanism by which we interpret the world. The allusive language of art subverts facticity to reveal and celebrate those qualities of human experience that are invisible to reductive and literalistic thinking. ‘To pretend is not to put forth illusions, but to elaborate intelligible structures.’ Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics

Without a critical apparatus it is not possible to compare like with like, or to distinguish difference. The imagination, combined with critical faculties, has the same function in art as in mathematics; it creates a language. A visual language cannot have a singular incidence. It must have repetition, syntax, lexical elements; it requires an internal coherence. By incidence of its transmission inclusion is intended.

The hand drawn line is a triple capture, sealing at once the conceptualisation of an idea, intended expression, that is, emotive content, and the mediated character of the artist. A little line can hold both simplicity and subtlety in perfect tension. I like its essential character.

Recently however, I have felt unable to constrain myself to remain within the figurative language as I have been searching for forms of content that, in literary terms, would be called poetics. An armadillo is a self-protective metaphor; the selective nature of a metonym, however, inflects. In ‘The Boar, the Blossom, and the Aggregate Path’ the heat and the fur of the boar are of especial value to me in order that I may oppose them to the delicacy of the blossoms. Shape, size and orientation, previously subjugated to the figure in service of the content of the painting, are allowed to become superscript and subscript.

This passage from the late Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Follower” has long been my inspiration:

My father worked with a horse-plough,

His shoulders globed like a full sail strung

Between the shafts and the furrow.

The horse strained at his clicking tongue.

The second line creates, in addition to the image, a requirement for the speaker to touch the tongue to the roof of the mouth six times; the clicking, intimated in advance of its naming, becomes familiar like the relationship described.

In my latest work, I am attempting to parse qualities from subjects, distill them, and reintroduce them in order that I may layer and inflect content whilst retaining simplicity and subtlety.

Societal taboos continue to operate to negate the ordinary, human, process girls traverse in order to become adults. Cultural conventions attribute to girls the sexuality of adults, or conversely, abstract concepts of purity that divest them of humanity and individuality. Girls may experience the arrival of sexuality as if it were a strange animal. It may surface as a love of horses or strange sensations of longing that seem to have no object.

Perhaps one of the functions of art is to take us back to adolescence, inviting us to start again at a place of painful flexibility. In French the word ‘recreation’ retains its original flavour; alongside art we recreate ourselves and come away a little tired, in a good way.