Julia Couzens

[9][25] During and after graduate studies, Couzens drew attention for her art in shows at the Christopher Grimes (Santa Monica), Jeremy Stone (San Francisco) and Michael Himovitz (Sacramento) galleries; the Oakland Museum and Yale University also acquired works.

[28][30] Couzens's body-derived work ranges from monumental figurative-based charcoal drawings to abstract watercolors that evoke internal cellular realities to sculptural objects resembling external body parts.

[9][4] Writer Debra Wilbur suggested that this work created mystery through its oscillation between the micro- and macroscopic,[34] while curator Bruce Guenther located its fascination in its hovering between being "seductive and grotesque, abstract and referential.

[10][35][36] She first gained attention in the late 1980s for large charcoal drawings of headless, armless, torso-like forms floating in amorphous space (e.g., Respirandi Spatium, 1993), that were noted for their Seurat-like shadings of dark and light and mystical, funereal quality.

[14][37][38] Contrasting the lushly drawn forms and their surfaces pocked with scars, slashes and fissures, writers such as Jody Zellen observed that the work exposed human vulnerability to emotional and physical "tears,"[6] yet indulged erotic paradoxes of beauty and terror, attraction and repulsion.

"[26][33][39] In the mid-1990s, Couzens created randomly configured, gallery-wide drawing installations, such as Ab Intra Galore (1994), composed of large sheets of tumbling black orbs whose minimal, abstract patterns alluded to cells, DNA, and mitosis.

[31][9] Looking to shift away from her drawing work, she began transforming the grapes into humorous, vaguely perverse, paint and liquid resin-coated entities that evoked cells, eggs and eyes, using the modeling compound, Sculpey.

[1][28] The intricate whorls and linear patterns of the lace suggested webs, nests, veins and fingerprints, leading her work to attend more to natural forces beyond the body and cultural issues involving domesticity and power.

[47][35] Their assortment of visual reference points—spider webs, seaweed, dense underbrush, crochet, networks—signaled a departure from distinct objects to more ambiguous, shifting matrices of nature and culture unraveling, ensnaring or conjoining that emphasized fragility, ephemerality and tenuousness.

[28] In "Strange Fascination" (2006), she expanded the work spatially and materially, transforming steel cages, yarn, electrical tape, lighting fixtures, fabric, and more, into obsessive pieces that referenced domesticity and femininity.

[35] Couzens's "Bundles"[52] consist of intuitive, abstract sculptural forms evoking god's eyes, dreamcatchers or cat's cradles, that she builds up through processes of wrapping, binding, stitching and layering, and displays as wall pieces or floating "satellites," such as Chanteuse (2016, top).