Julia Couzens

Public collections

Her drawings and sculptures have been acquired by prominent private and public collections, including Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art; Equitable Life New York; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Butler Institute of American Art; Crocker Art Museum; Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts;Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hewlett-Packard Dublin, Ireland; New Britain Museum of American Art; Oakland Museum of California; South Texas Institute for the Arts; Syntex Corporation; Weatherspoon Art Museum; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation; and Yale University Art Gallery.

Early life and career

Couzens was born in Auburn, California. Her mother Jean Little Couzens was founding editor of West Art, the West Coast's first contemporary art newspaper, which began around 1960. She was a lifetime creative and literary mentor for the artist.

Couzens graduated from California State University, Chico with a BA in English and philosophy, before attending California College of Arts and Crafts. She earned an MA in 1987 from California State University, Sacramento, followed by an MFA in 1990 from University of California, Davis, where she was a graduate assistant for Manuel Neri, Cornelia Schulz, and Wayne Thiebaud.

Work

Couzens' work has been described as “quiet, revelatory, wry, fleshy, obscene, sassy, irreverent, enigmatic, disturbing, intuitive, imaginative, thoughtful, repulsive, surreal, dreamlike, precise, intoxicating, absurd, and ribald.” She "uses whatever medium helps her best solve the problem on which she is working."

Drawing

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Couzens gained a reputation making large-scale charcoal drawings focused on biomorphic forms like ovoids, torsos and eggs. Over time, Couzens’ drawings became aggregates of forms, akin to fractals, conveying “skin, blood cells, genes, and x-rays.”

Since the millennium, Couzens' drawings have tended to be multi-dimensional and made from non-traditional materials. For "NET WORK" (2003), she presented works "drawn with scissors," fabricated by layering cut strips of black and white tape atop vellum; and dangling webs and woven nets fastened from "mundane hardware and craft-store materials such as twisties, plastic, tape, wire and chenille stems." For this body of work, Couzens inserted "organic materials into her multi-layered sculptural nets, to reflect her simultaneous engagement with the aesthetics of the natural as well as the cultural." Renny Pritikin describes her tape drawings as "loose grids of black —sometimes tree branch-like; sometimes jagged and abstract, or suggestive of man-made systematic structures— set against the translucency of the vellum...."

Painting

In the 1990s, Couzens poured layers of translucent vinyl acetate over wood to produce a series of paintings that were in dialogue with her mid-nineties sculptures. David Roth states that these paintings evoke “a range of polymorphous longings that point not only to the psychological roots of desire but to the microscopic origins of life itself....Where previous charcoal [drawings] seemed to be about the emotional and sexual value of scarred corporeal forms, these paintings take the macroscopic view….They appear, by conscious intent, to represent the very stuff of life: blood, membrane, tissue and cells.”

Janice Driesbach described her 1994 painting Skin Deep as "address[ing] our attachment to, fascination with; repulsion by; and fear of the physical nature of our being. Its 'creepy, beautiful' vinyl acetate surface compounds the erotic content; causing a heightened response: These apparent contradictions give Couzens' pieces power to engage viewers with the 'fascinating, lethal, and potentially beautiful'."

Debra Wilbur attributes the mystery of these mid-nineties paintings to our "inability to project ourselves into either the micro- or macrocosm."

Globules (1995–1999)

While in residency at the Roswell Museum and Art Center, she began transforming commercially-available plastic grapes, purchased from thrift and dime stores, into sculptures, whose forms evoked cells, eggs, and/or eyes. She subsequently made the objects by hand using Sculpey, a low-fire craft ceramic, which became one of her signature materials at the time. Debra Wilbur associates these works with "the mutated, disarticulated; and sometimes morbid aspects of the body, [for which Couzens] crafts the clefts, cambers, and protuberances in human detail....Chimerical mischief makers run rampant-free of the stifling intermediate conscience, of the manners and control of the whole (be it body or society). They are indecent, ill-mannered and lewd.

Bundles (2009—present)

Commonplace tasks of wrapping, binding, stitching, and layering are some of the processes used to create her intuitive sculptural forms and constructions. She uses fiber, twine, thread, wire, plastic fruit baskets, found fabric and textiles, and any plaint material to construct her "mysterious objects." Renny Pritikin has described her eccentric sculptures' garish color combinations as "visual piñatas of desire," and compares them to those of El Anatsui, Claes Oldenberg and the late Judith Scott. "Interlaced and woven together with bits of cast-off fabric, knitting and crocheting, they never congeal, and don't even try to conceal that they are in essence three-dimensional patchworks --mendings upon mendings."

Installation Art

Between 1994 and 1995, Couzens created Lingua Franca, 3200 Sculpey tongues installed at the Crocker Art Museum. Barbara Milman notes, "Arrayed on a wall, these tongues depict the fleshy, damp, flexible nature of the human body, conveying the physicality of bodily life even more directly than a charcoal drawing of a figure." Her large environments of lacy tattings and crocheted scrims made of twist ties and pipe cleaners "reference landscape, a paean to nature's tatting in thickets of vines, undergrowth and arboreal foliage."

Teaching, residencies, fellowships

In addition to having held several teaching positions in the art departments of Scripps College (1990-1991), University of California, Santa Cruz (1995), University of Nevada, Las Vegas (1997), San Francisco Art Institute (1998-1999), California State University, Sacramento (1999-2001), and University of California, Davis (1999-2003), Couzens has received numerous awards, including a visual artist fellowship from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. She has been an artist-in resident at the Roswell Museum and Art Center (1994) and the Putah-Cache Bioregion Project (1998–1999) at the University of California, Davis.