Biting and Chewing as Sculptural Gestures
By
Patricia Huijnen

Maîtrise en Arts Plastiques, Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg
(currently named Université Marc Bloch), France, 1999

A THESIS ESSAY SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF APPLIED ARTS
In
Visual Arts

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2012

© Patricia Huijnen, 2012

Abstract

This thesis essay contextualizes a specific aspect of my art practice ‐ the use of the
mouth as sculptural tool. It examines the destructive and formative element of the bite
exploring this gesture from a physiological, sense‐related and art historical perspective.
What drives my practice‐based research (Borgdorff, Sullivan) is the question of how
embodied sensations can be transferred from the mouth to an object.
Descriptions of bodily sensations related to the ingestion of food and its rejection
(De Beauvoir) and theories of embodied perception (Merleau‐Ponty, Grosz) inform my
investigation of the biting process. Affect as a liminal space of acting and being acted upon
(Seigworth, Gregg) and the relation between sensorial perception and emotions (Highmore)
are considered in relation to the mouth. The process of biting and chewing is compared to
traditional sculpting techniques such as molding using art historian Georges Didi‐
Huberman’s analysis of the empreinte [impression] as backdrop. Related to explorations of
soft materials and chance (Duchamp, Oppenheim, Benglis), as well as feminist art practices
involving the body, I focus on the works Petit Dessert I (1970‐71) and Photosculptures (1971)
by Alina Szapocznikow, The Destruction of the Father (1974) by Louise Bourgeois, and Gnaw
(1992) by Janine Antoni to situate my practice within a specific artistic context. The essay
also considers the physical contextualization of the chewed objects within the sculptures
through the concept of ‘spitting’. The sculptures represent the liminal position of biting,
between destruction and formation, through physical instability and suggestion.

ii

Table of Contents

Abstract ................................................................................................................. ii
Table of contents .................................................................................................. iii
List of figures ........................................................................................................ iv
Preface .......... ........................................................................................................ vi
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................... vii

Chapter 1. On biting, chewing and spitting .......................................................... 1
1.1 Chewing and Spitting ........................................................................... 2
1.2 Jawbreaker ........................................................................................... 3
1.3 Spoon ................................................................................................... 4
Chapter 2. Implements ......................................................................................... 5
2.1 Practice‐based research ....................................................................... 5
Chapter 3. Introduction to the mouth ................................................................. 9
3.1 Physiological functions of the mouth .................................................. 9
3.2 Ingestion of food and embodied reactions ......................................... 11
3.2.1 Affect ..................................................................................... 14
Chapter 4. Biting and chewing matter ................................................................. 17
4.1 Material processes .............................................................................. 17
4.2 The mouth as mold .............................................................................. 23
4.3 The mouth as tool in sculpture by female artists ................................ 24
4.3.1 Alina Szapocznikow Petit Dessert I and
Photosculptures .................................................................... 25
4.3.2 Louise Bourgeois The Destruction of the Father ................... 29
4.3.3 Janine Antoni Gnaw .............................................................. 31
Chapter 5. Spitting ................................................................................................ 35

Bibliography .......................................................................................................... 39
Appendices ............................................................................................................ 44

iii

List of Figures
Fig. 1. Patricia Huijnen, Chewing‐gum, 2005. Video still. Photo: Patricia Huijnen.
Used by permission of the artist. .................................................................................................. vi
Fig. 2. Patricia Huijnen, Chewing and Spitting, 2010‐2011. Wood, fabric, porcelain,
marshmallows. 64x64x70cm. Installation at Mitchell Gallery. Photo: Patricia Huijnen.
Used by permission of the artist. ……………………………………………………………………………………………... 2
Fig. 3. Patricia Huijnen, Chewing and Spitting, 2010‐2011, detail. Wood, fabric,
porcelain, marshmallows. 64x64x70cm. Installation at Concourse Gallery ECUAD.
Photo: Patricia Huijnen. Used by permission of the artist. ……………………………………………………….. 2
Fig. 4. Patricia Huijnen, Jawbreaker, 2011‐2012. Steel, wood, glass, pigmented wax.
20x16x45 inch. Installation at studio. Photo: Patricia Huijnen.
Used by permission of the artist. .................................................................................................. 3
Fig. 5. Patricia Huijnen, Jawbreaker, 2011‐2012, detail. Steel, wood, glass,
pigmented wax. 20x16x45 inch. Installation at studio. Photo: Patricia Huijnen.
Used by permission of the artist. .................................................................................................. 3
Fig. 6. Patricia Huijnen, Spoon, 2010‐2011. Bronze. 10x3x1 inch.
Installation at Latitude 53, Edmonton. Photo: Patricia Huijnen.
Used by permission of the artist. .................................................................................................. 4
Fig.7. Patricia Huijnen, Diagram (Thesis), 2011. Pencil on paper. 8 ½ x 11 inch.
Scan: Patricia Huijnen. Used by permission of the artist. ............................................................. 8
Fig. 8: Patricia Huijnen, Interaction Diagram, 2012. Used by permission of the artist. ................ 15
Fig. 9. Patricia Huijnen, Jawbreaker, 2011‐2012, detail. Steel, wood, glass,
pigmented wax. 20x16x45 inch. Installation at Latitude 53, Edmonton.
Photo: Patricia Huijnen. Used by permission of the artist. ........................................................... 16
Fig. 10. Lynda Benglis, Totem, 1971. Iron oxide, Geigy Red, Radiante Red
and titanium white pigmented polyurethane foam (destroyed).
Hayden Gallery, MIT, Boston. Dimensions variable. ..................................................................... 18
Fig. 11. Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936. Fur‐covered cup, saucer, and spoon.
Cup 4 3/8" (10.9 cm) in diameter; saucer 9 3/8" (23.7 cm) in diameter;
spoon 8" (20.2 cm) long, overall height 2 7/8" (7.3 cm). MoMA. ................................................. 20
Fig. 12. Patricia Huijnen, Spoon, Experiments, 2010. Sugar, wax.
Dimensions variable. Photo: Elisa Ferrari. Used by permission of Elisa Ferrari. ........................... 21
Fig. 13. Patricia Huijnen, Spoon, 2011. Pewter. 10x3x1 inch. Photo: Patricia Huijnen.
Used by permission of the artist. .................................................................................................. 22
Fig. 14. Patricia Huijnen, Spoon, 2010‐2011. Bronze. 10x3x1 inch.
Installation at Latitude 53, Edmonton. Photo: Patricia Huijnen.
Used by permission of the artist. .................................................................................................. 22

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Fig. 15. Alina Szapocznikow, Petit Dessert I, 1970‐1971. Colored polyester resin
and glass. 3 (8 x 11 x 13 cm). Kravis Collection. ............................................................................ 27
Fig. 16. Alina Szapocznikow, Photosculptures, 1971. B/w photographs,
21 parts: 24 x 30 cm each. ............................................................................................................. 28
Fig. 17. Louise Bourgeois, The Destruction of the Father, 1974. Plaster, latex,
wood, fabric, red light. 93 5/8 x 142 5/8 x 97 7/8 in. (237.8 x 362.3 x 248.6 cm). ........................ 29
Fig. 18. Janine Antoni, Gnaw, 1992. 600 lbs. of chocolate gnawed by the artist
(24 x 24 x 24 inches); 600 lbs. of lard, gnawed by the artist (24 X 24 X 24 inches);
45 heart‐shaped packages for chocolate made from chewed chocolate removed
from the chocolate cube and 400 lipsticks made with pigment, beeswax and chewed
lard removed from the lard cube. Dimensions variable. Installation shot (LA MOCA).
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. ............................................................. 31
Fig. 19. Janine Antoni, Gnaw, 1992. 600 lbs. of chocolate gnawed by the artist
(24 x 24 x 24 inches). Installation shot (LA MOCA). Courtesy of the artist and
Luhring Augustine, New York. ....................................................................................................... 33
Fig. 20. Patricia Huijnen, Jawbreaker, 2011‐2012. Steel, wood, glass, pigmented wax.
20x16x45 inch. Installation at studio. Photo: Patricia Huijnen.
Used by permission of the artist. .................................................................................................. 38

v

Preface
It starts with chewing gum. I spit it out and see a pink, sticky blob of material carrying traces
of my body – my teeth. The gum becomes strangely intimate. Part foreign, part
familiar it records a repetitive, daily gesture – chewing.

I continue to explore chewing as a sculptural, form‐ and imprint‐making technique
involving mouth‐sized items and malleable materials and am eager to observe what other
kinds of impressive and extensive shapes my mouth generates. I chew marshmallows to spit
them out and observe the traces of my body on them.

Marshmallows are soft, white, neutral and have this mouth‐sized, tubular shape. The
powdery surface feels dry at first. A few bites and the marshmallow starts to melt and
fall apart. So sweet. Saliva accumulates. I swallow. I didn’t spit it out. The next one, I
chew less, carefully form the marshmallow with my teeth. Push it around with my
tongue. Imagining it at the verge of falling apart, I spit it out. It looks good. Not bad
for an impression. Some parts are glossy, others rough. White and soft. Still humid, I
put it down, let it dry, see if it will hold the shape.

Fig. 1. Patricia Huijnen, Chewing‐gum, 2005, video still.
Photo: Patricia Huijnen. Used by permission of the artist.

vi

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank:
Ruth Beer, my supervisor, for her insight and supporting critiques, my internal
examiner Alexandra Phillips, my external examiner Elspeth Pratt, as well as Randy Lee Cutler,
Karolle Wall, Ben Reeves, Elisabeth MacKenzie, Patrik Andersson, Kyla Mallet and my
teachers at ECUAD. George Rammel for his precious casting skills and Ben Lee, Dale Gamble,
Camrose Ducote for the caramel idea, David Morgan, Anatole Russel‐Ingram, Leon Popik, Ian
Rhodes and the technical staff at ECUAD. Kate Rimmer from the Charles H. Scott Gallery. The
ECUAD Library for their friendliness and multiple services. Cameron Cartiere, Dean of
Graduate Studies, Angeles Hernandez Correa and the Graduate Office. The President’s
Research Fund. The international students office. My co‐students and studio neighbours for
their critiques and enthusiasm. Jill Cook, Gail Murray, Sandra Martins, Camilia Yuen and the
Mackin House Museum in Coquitlam. David Choo, dental technician, for letting me visit his
studio. My friend Sandra Philipps‐Luethi for editing. My friends and family for their support.
My partner Andres Wanner for his shoulder and care.

vii

Chapter 1. On biting, chewing and spitting

Biting, chewing and spitting are generating gestures that make up significant components of
my sculptures. They describe my artistic process and metaphorically frame the body
of this thesis essay.

My sculptures suggest embodied experiences and refer to the domestic realm
through table‐like structures, malleable materials, and the intimate traces of teeth on food
items and found objects. Suggestion and ideas of instability play a central role in my practice.
This thesis essay presents a specific aspect of my art practice ‐ the use of the mouth
as sculptural tool. Through practice‐based research I explore how a sensory experience that
takes place inside the mouth can be transferred onto objects through contact. I examine the
potential of biting as a sculptural gesture through investigating its destructive and formative
qualities. The suggestive power of bitten objects withstands the categorization of words.
Instead they speak through the repetition of corporeal impressions and manipulated every
day objects that resemble and represent the mouth through their function, shape, material
or size such as marshmallows, jawbreaker gums, bowls and spoons.
The mouth is of special interest to me, as it is the physical manifestation of an in‐
between state. I consider the mouth as a liminal space for transfer and interaction, of
shifting from inside to outside, from private to public, from sensual to repulsive and vice
versa.
As French and German are my first languages they inform my thinking as well as the
choices of my references, such as Georges Didi‐Huberman and his analysis of the empreinte
[impression]. The term empreinte refers to the material result of an impression/imprint as
well as the verb ‘emprunter’ which means ‘to borrow’. The use of the term empreinte
stresses the indexical1 relation between the original form and its impression.

1

Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce describes different kinds of relationships between objects and signs and
establishes amongst others the following categories: Index, Icon and Symbol (Peirce, Charles Sanders and
Justus Buchler, ed. Philosophical Writings of Peirce). Rosalind Krauss describes the index in “Notes on the
Index: Seventies Art in America” with the following words: “As distinct from symbols, indexes establish their
meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents. They are the marks or traces of a particular
cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify. Into the category of the index, we
would place physical traces (like footprints), [and] medical symptoms” (70).

1

Three of my works, Chewing and Spitting, Jawbreaker and Spoon, will serve as
references throughout the text.

1.1 Chewing and Spitting

Fig. 2. Patricia Huijnen, Chewing and Spitting, 2010‐2011. Wood,
fabric, porcelain, marshmallows. 64x64x70cm. Installation at
Mitchell Gallery. Photo: Patricia Huijnen. Used by permission of
the artist.

Fig. 3. Patricia Huijnen, Chewing and Spitting,
2010‐2011, detail. Wood, fabric, porcelain,
marshmallows. 64x64x70cm. Installation at
Concourse Gallery ECUAD. Photo: Patricia
Huijnen. Used by permission of the artist.

For the work Chewing and Spitting (2010‐2011) I chewed marshmallows, spat them
out and placed them in hand made, cast porcelain mouth size collapsing bowls. I pushed and
stuck the bowls and their content into a soft, thick, cream coloured tablecloth, heaped and
huddled onto a tea table, intentionally resembling the soft and malleable shape of the
marshmallows. Through the irregularity of their support, the bowls turned, tipped and
spilled their contents. The installation of the marshmallows resembled their shaping process:
unexpected, randomly chewed and spat out. The use of marshmallows as a sculptural
material has been significant in my exploration of sculptural materials. Their malleability,
white colour and the unspecific nature of their composition transforms them in my eyes into
an artificial material – a sculptural material that can be sensed and formed by the mouth. My
sculptural process transforms the marshmallows from edible to indigestible.
2

1.2 Jawbreaker

Fig. 4. Patricia Huijnen, Jawbreaker, 2011‐2012. Steel, wood, glass,
pigmented wax. 20x16x45 inch. Installation at studio.
Photo: Patricia Huijnen. Used by permission of the artist.

Fig. 5. Patricia Huijnen, Jawbreaker, 2011‐
2012, detail. Steel, wood, glass, pigmented
wax. 20x16x45 inch. Installation at studio.
Photo: Patricia Huijnen. Used by permission of
the artist.

The work Jawbreaker (2011‐2012) consists of a set of partially bitten and chewed
slightly off‐white spheres that precariously balance on glass table structure at elbow height.
The slightest movement might provoke them to fall off the table support. The spherical
volumes were derived from a specific kind of chewing‐gum, a two inch jawbreaker. Out of a
mold from the original gum, the spheres were cast in white pigmented wax. Through their
bitten and partially chewed treatment, as well as their ambiguous material properties, the
spheres suggest both softness and resistance. They resemble milk, cream, something white
but opaque; they visually convey a dense, hermetic almost rubber like feel. Through its
ambiguous and poetic character the sculpture resists classification through words. Being
slightly too big for the mouth, the partially bitten spheres suggest questions about the
volumetric capacity of the mouth, about measurements and their relation to the body, as
will be discussed in chapter 4.1.

3

1.3 Spoon

Fig. 6. Patricia Huijnen, Spoon, 2010‐2011. Bronze.
10x3x1 inch. Installation at Latitude 53, Edmonton.
Photo: Patricia Huijnen. Used by permission of the artist.

The piece Spoon (2010‐2011) is a bitten spoon hung on the wall. The spoon is bitten,
not chewed and not melted. The spoon, an important component of the sculpture, was
developed through multiple iterations and materials ‐ sugar, caramel, wax, pewter and
finally bronze. In previous forms the treatment of the spoon was not clearly identifiable. The
traces of the teeth were too inconspicuous and the chewing seemed too close to the natural
melting aspect of the material. I decided that it was important, that the spoon appeared to
be unmistakably formed and affected by the mouth. As an everyday tool a spoon refers to
the domestic and its nurturing function. A spoon is meant to contain and offer food. A bitten
spoon is dysfunctional. In its present configuration, hanging on the wall and bitten, Spoon
can’t and is not meant to contain food. Cast in bronze the spoon is transformed and refers to
traditional sculpture.
The violence inherent in the act of biting, the destruction of something that is caught
inside the mouth, comes to the surface in this work.

4

This essay is divided into five main chapters, including an introductory chapter.
Chapter two, “Implements”, presents the framework of my practice‐based research
methodology. It discusses the interrelationship of theory and practice in my research and is
informed by the writing of art theorists Henk Borgdorff and Graeme Sullivan.
In the third chapter, “Introduction to the mouth”, biting is analyzed from a
physiological as well as embodied perspective. I consider the affective potential of this
gesture based on literary descriptions and theoretical investigations on the ingestion of food
and the reactions it evokes. I refer to writing by feminist philosopher Simone De Beauvoir
and affect theory as discussed by Gregory J. Seigworth, Melissa Gregg and Ben Higmore.
“Biting and chewing matter”, the fourth chapter, transfers the previously developed
ideas into the physical realm of artistic creation. The technique of molding, the explored
materials and their suggestive quality are examined using art historian Georges Didi‐
Huberman’s analysis of the empreinte [impression] as backdrop. I situate my sculptural
practice within a process‐based artistic context, relating it to Post‐Minimalist and feminist
art practices. The works Dessert I and Photosculptures by Alina Szapocznikow, Destruction of
the Father by Louise Bourgeois and Gnaw by Janine Antoni are analysed and serve as specific
artistic references for my work.
In the last chapter, “Spitting”, the contextualization of the chewed parts within the
sculptures and their presentation is addressed. The question of how the different
components of each work affect each other is examined.

Chapter 2. Implements

The mouth is my sculptural tool and the site of my research. The mouth is the area that I am
uncovering and at the same time the implement to undertake this challenge.

2.1 Practice‐based research
In his paper “The Debate on Research in the Arts” from 2006, Dutch art theorist Henk
Borgdorff stresses that from a scientific point of view research is an “original investigation

5

undertaken in order to gain knowledge and understanding” (RAE2 qtd. in Borgdorff 9). This
leads to the question: In what ways can artists be considered as researchers and artistic
practices a contribution to the development of knowledge?
I agree with American artist, art theorist and educator Graeme Sullivan, as argued in
his paper “Research Acts in Art Practice” from 20063, and with artist and researcher Michael
Schwab, editor‐in‐chief of the recently published online platform Journal for Artistic
Research, who both point out the transformative character of artistic research. Schwab
describes the transformative nature of artistic research as “making the experience of a
change of knowledge count” (Schwab). I suggest that through valuing experience in research
the artist‐researcher is considered an embodied subject, situated in a specific context.
Borgdorff has described the kind of knowledge represented in art as one “which has been
variously analysed as tacit, practical knowledge, as ‘knowing‐how’ and as sensory
knowledge” (Borgdorff 15). The knowledge that affects and transforms me, as an artist and
researcher, is a type of knowledge intimately tied to the creative process. Sullivan adds that
“research is a transformative act that has an impact on the researcher and the researched”
(Sullivan 22). I argue that transformation in artistic research can be considered as an
embodied experience that develops in an interactive process between the artist and her
research, which occurs on a practical as well as theoretical level, and affects both. For
example in my practice the act of chewing is an embodied experience in that it is a tactile,
sensual experience. It becomes an imprint on an object that then carries this embodied
experience. The theoretical concepts behind this are explained in chapter three and five.
Artistic research has been articulated differently according to its focus. Sullivan
describes arts‐based and arts‐informed research as practices that essentially expand classical
social science research methods for educational inquiry. Dance, photography etc become
valid research tools in an educative setting. Sullivan qualifies practice‐based research as a
visual research method that is grounded in the artist’s studio (23‐26). I consider my research
a practice‐based research that has its roots in the studio and is strongly process oriented. My
research goals originate from my artistic practice and are the result of a close analysis of my
process, its conceptual basis and experimental nature. Academic research and artistic

2

RAE stands for Research Assessment Exercise. The RAE produces quality profiles for each submission of
research activity made by institutions in the UK. www.rae.ac.uk
3
The concepts exposed in this paper were originally published in Graeme Sullivan’s book Art Practice as
Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts in 2005.

6

practice are tightly interwoven. Borgdorff points out that in practice‐based research “the
artistic practice itself is an essential component of both the research process and the
research results” (Borgdorff 7). The sculptures I produce are at the origin of my research
and at the same time, as they transform, witness the process of my research. What drives
my research is the desire to understand how embodied reactions can be transferred from
the mouth to an object. As my theoretical research proceeds, the art is informed by concepts
that name and contextualize what takes place on a physical level in my practice. My interest
in specific areas of research, such as the mouth, its physiological characteristics and
embodied ways of knowing, is sharpened by both theory and practice. Theory deepens the
understanding of my practice and specifies my position in a critical and art historical context.
The concepts I am confronted with on a theoretical level start to influence my sculptural
objects and vice‐versa. This manifests itself in the concept of bolus. Bolus is a biological
definition for a mouthful of food. Applied to my work, this term names and theoretically
situates the mouthful‐sized shapes I produce within a somatic realm. This concept is
described further in chapter three under “Physiological functions of the mouth”.
In this practice‐based research context, corporeal and material association play an
important role. My sculptural choices are strongly guided by the representation as well as
the consistency and sensory perception of the mouth, teeth, tongue and lips. Malleable,
fluid and flexible materials and found objects, such as bowls or spoons, are reminiscent of
the mouth. I start to manipulate these substances and objects in order to suggest on a
material level what happens initially on an intuitive, sensed level. I achieve a state of
experimentation, in which material manifestations and suggestions are constantly adjusted,
stretched and expanded through testing, observing and contextualizing. This process is what
Sullivan describes as “forming acts in art practice” when he addresses where research takes
place within an art practice (Sullivan 31). He states that
for many art researchers art materials are still the most tangible means that give
form to imaginative thought. […] In this process the artwork becomes the primary
site and source of knowledge. […] Forms, materials, properties, and qualities become
the means by which concerns are explored and expressed. This reflective intent fuels
an exploratory tendency as new forms and images are created, and these open up
the possibility of new meanings. A characteristic of these research acts is that
understanding emerges within the process of media experimentation, and this per
formative knowledge can be likened to more traditional grounded strategies such as
observation and empirical confirmation. (Sullivan 31)

7

I am using the concept of exploration as a metaphor for my research practice describing its
ability to detect and represent what is hidden. This is further informed by the idea that the
key elements are present and existing, but need to be revealed. My exploration of the
mouth is a visualization of an area that is usually hidden from sight. Each bitten object I
produce shows the same area, the mouth, the teeth or the tongue, in another context;
uncovered and explored using different conditions and different materials.
I also use explorative methods, such as brainstorming and mind‐mapping in my
theoretical research. The Diagram drawing series (Fig. 7) are the visual traces of my
contextualizing process. These drawings usually start with a key term. Through associative
thinking bridges are generated toward relevant and related concepts. This method allows
me to think laterally and instigates the emergence of new topics.

Fig.7. Patricia Huijnen, Diagram (Thesis), 2011. Pencil on paper. 8 ½ x 11 inch. Scan: Patricia Huijnen.
Used by permission of the artist.

The mouth is an essential implement in my artistic research. It delineates the
theoretical realm of investigation, guides the choice of materials and forms, functions as my
sculptural tool and also determines the size of the produced objects. It is therefore
significant to describe and examine its functions as they relate to my understanding and use
of the mouth. The introceptive and extroceptive action of the mouth, contact perception

8

and its shaping capacity are described in the next chapter from a physiological and sense‐
related perspective.

Chapter 3. Introduction to the mouth

The introduction of the food into the mouth marks the contact between the outside world,
represented by the food, and the inside of the body. The sensation against the lips
and tongue are the first stage in this encounter, followed by the bite.

3.1 Physiological functions of the mouth
The extensive and explicit vocabulary of scientific descriptions of the human
physiology and its bodily processes fascinate me. With an apparent objectivity every notion
of sensual experience seems to be eliminated or explained as a logical, linear sequence of
events. And still, the amount of words and the seemingly endless listings of phrases used to
describe the processes in their utmost detail resonate with me almost in a poetic way. In her
paper “Situated Knowledges: The science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspetive” Donna Haraway, feminist theorist and philosopher of science and technology,
describes this “objective” point of view as one that “claim[s] the power to see and not be
seen, to represent while escaping representation” and situates it within the “unmarked
positions of Man and White […] in scientific and technological, late industrial, […] male‐
dominant societies” (Haraway 581). She further on specifies that “all Western cultural
narratives about objectivity are allegories of the ideologies governing the relations of what
we call mind and body, distance and responsibility” (Haraway 583). Following Haraway’s
postulation that “feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge” (583)
I am attempting to make use of detailed biological descriptions of the mouth and its
processes in order to situate them back within a personal, experiential and located realm,
and consider the mind and body relation from an embodied point of view.
Physiological descriptions of the ‘upper gastrointestinal tract’ stress the digestive
function of the mouth. The human mouth, also called the oral or buccal cavity, is described
as the entry point into the human digestive system. The mouth receives food, produces
saliva and contains a mucous membrane, a tongue and teeth. Saliva, tongue and teeth all

9

play a role in the first stage of digestion ‐ the chewing of food, and its mixing with saliva. In
his book The Digestive System Michael Windelspecht points out that “the human mouth is
the site of both mechanical and enzymatic digestive processes” (16). Jaw, teeth and tongue
are involved in the mechanical function of breaking the food into small portions and moving
it to the back of the mouth. Viewed under this mechanical perspective the teeth are
separated into three groups: the incisors cut the food, the cuspids tear and shred it, the
molars crush and grind (Windelspecht 20). The saliva starts the enzymatic digestive process
of the food and also has the mechanical role of lubricating the chewed food to facilitate
swallowing. Once thoroughly masticated and swallowed the mouthful of food travels
through the esophagus, from mouth to stomach. Such a mouthful of food is called ‘bolus’, in
reference to the Latin word bolus for ball. Windelspecht’s glossary defines bolus as “the
name given to the mass of food that accumulates at the rear of the oral cavity for
swallowing” (170). The bolus is shaped and transported to the stomach through a muscular
movement called peristalsis.
The tongue also plays an important role as a receptor for taste and sensations. Parts
of the food dissolved in saliva come into contact with taste receptors, which then channel
the information to the gustatory area of the brain.
In addition to its role as the beginning of the digestive system the mouth also has
non‐digestive functions. It plays an important role in producing sounds for verbal
communication for example. While primary aspects of the voice are produced in the throat,
the tongue, lips and jaw are also needed to shape the range of sounds included in human
language. One may have experienced that speaking and eating or swallowing are conflicting
gestures. If engaged in shifting around of food, the tongue can’t produce the range of fine
movements needed for consonant or vowel sound pronunciation.
These multiple roles and its specific location turn the mouth into a transitional place.
The lips for example mark the passage from the inner membrane to the outside skin.
Feminist academic Elisabeth Grosz explains that the mouth “functions both introceptively
and extroceptively. It is a primordial link or bridge connecting perceptions from the inside
and the outside of the body” (Grosz 92). I am particularly interested in the double
employment of the mouth, on the one hand working introceptively through nutrition for
example, and on the other hand extroceptively, through speech and how both are
connected. In my work, I make use of the mechanical characteristics of the mouth as a

10

sculptural tool, molding and modelling with teeth, oral cavity and tongue and deal with its
conflicting forces in a formative way. Cutting, grinding, and chewing gestures are
transformed into expressive artistic actions. What is ingested and enters the first stage of
digestion through chewing and biting is spat out again. In the same way that the mouth
shapes sounds through speech, the material object that is spat out is shaped by the mouth
and conveys experiences from the inside.
The mouth also provides information from the outside to the inside of the body. The
mouth as a perceptive organ plays an important role in childhood development. Babies
explore the world through the mouth. Here the destructive gesture of biting is formative of
sensory experience and knowledge construction. Elisabeth Grosz states in Volatile Bodies
that
the mouth, as Freud recognized, is especially privileged in terms of its sensitivity to
sensations. (…) There is a gradual shift from such contact perception to more distance‐
oriented perception, especially hearing and seeing, but to begin with the various
senses are not all operational, not organized or integrated to form a coherent set of
synesthetic perceptions. (Grosz 92)
Grosz refers to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and classifies sense related perceptions
according to the distance between the object of perception and the perceiving body. The
sensing experience of feel and taste inside the mouth are intimate processes. Contact
perception and the focus on the sensory perception inside the mouth is relevant in my use of
the mouth as a molding and modelling tool. In chapter four under “Material processes” and
“The mouth as mold” this aspect will be analysed further.
For now, I take a closer look at how contact perception inside the mouth plays a role
in the organization of our experience of the world. Due to the primordial role of contact
perception in childhood, the following quotes by Vesta Farnsworth and Simone De Beauvoir
relate to childhood experiences.

3.2 Ingestion of food and embodied reactions
The door, or entrance, is so small we can not possibly go inside ourselves, so here is a
slice of good whole‐wheat bread we will send, and I will tell you what it finds within.
As it has no tongue, I will speak the words it would say if it could talk, and you ask
any question you wish. (Farnsworth 72)

11

Taken from a rather unconventional source, a children’s education book on
physiology from 1900, The House we Live in, or, The Making of the Body by author Vesta
Farnsworth, this quote compares the body to a house and more specifically the mouth to a
door or entrance. The entire book consists of a dialogue between a mother and her two
children, a girl and a boy, and explains the body’s physiology. In addition to exposing the
now outdated ideologies of the period, such as explaining the relation between the mind
and the body in dualist terms of master and servant, this quote addresses important
concepts that are relevant for my artistic practice.
I enjoy the author’s description of sending a piece of bread into the body to explore
and narrate its inside experience. The mother in the book suggests taking the bread’s point
of view and explaining its experiences as if it was a human being. The knowledge described
in the book stems from biological and scientific achievements of the time. But taking the
voice of the piece of bread, this knowledge takes on an embodied perspective: the point of
view of the bolus in the oral cavity. The same way my chewed objects are witnesses of an
inside, sensory experience. Farnsworth details the bread’s treatment inside the mouth:
“Some of them [teeth] cut me in two. Others tore me into pieces and ground me till I
thought I was passing through another mill. As I had a chance, I looked around, and then I
saw the room I was in had a beautiful arched ceiling of a pale pink colour” (Farnsworth 74).
The bread’s experience inside the mouth is described as at once destructive and violent, and
awe inspiring. This contradiction of sensations inherent to the mouth and concrete
experiences as ways of knowing are significant concepts in my research.
I am viewing knowledge construction from a position which is informed by French
phenomenologist Maurice Merleau‐Ponty’s statements on how perception is engrained in
the body. In his book Phenomenology of Perception, first published in Paris in 1945, Merleau‐
Ponty writes, “I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, examine them, walk
round them, but my body itself is a thing which I do not observe (Merleau‐Ponty 104).” He
adds that the body “is neither tangible nor visible in so far as it is that which sees and
touches” (Merleau‐Ponty 105). Writing essentially about the incarnation of visual
perception, his words can also be applied to sense perception within the mouth. In my work
the mouth becomes an interface between objects and embodied sensations. Through the
sculptural process the mouth does not speak of those sensations but produces a physical
manifestation.

12

Analyzing Merleau‐Ponty’s theories within a feminist context, speaking from the
point of view of a female body, Elisabeth Grosz elaborates on the body’s role in knowledge
construction. The body
is "sense‐bestowing" and "form‐giving," providing a structure, organization, and
ground within which objects are to be situated and against which the body‐subject is
positioned. The body is my being to‐the‐world and as such is the instrument by which
all information and knowledge is received and meaning is generated. (Grosz 87)
Relevant to this essay is Grosz’s framing of the body as an instrument that gives form and
produces sense. In Jawbreaker, Chewing and Spitting or Spoon the body literally gives shape
and form to objects and through this provides them with embodied knowledge. This type of
knowledge is an experiential way of knowing; it is personal and coined by the individual
body, similar to the one experienced by the piece of bread in Farnsworth’s children’s book.
The knowledge that I am attempting to pass on through my work is not explained by words
but shaped by an experience of contact in the mouth; similar to a squished and indented
chewing‐gum that speaks of constant, speechless mastication.
To understand the emergence of potentially contradictory sensations inside the
mouth, I am investigating what kinds of experiences are generated through biting and
chewing. I am taking a closer look at descriptions of bodily reactions to food. In her book
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Simone de Beauvoir describes childhood experiences of the
world’s intimate perception and ingestion through the mouth. She writes:
The world became more intimately part of me when it entered through my mouth
than through my eyes and my sense of touch. I would not accept it entirely. The
insipidity of milk puddings, porridge, and mashes of bred and butter made me burst
into tears; the oiliness of fat meat and the clammy mysteries of shellfish revolted me;
tears, screams, vomitings. (Beauvoir 6)
De Beauvoir describes how the food sensed in the mouth provokes bodily reactions. While in
this quote, the sensation of mashes, puddings, oily and sticky consistencies incites revulsion,
in another quote the cracking of candy creates a bright feeling of pleasure and enjoyment.
De Beauvoir narrates:
I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of
light would illuminate my palate with a taste of black‐currant or pineapple: all the
colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held
the whole party in my mouth. (Beauvoir 7)

13

Inside the mouth the intimacy of the contact results in an immediate reaction. The response
to the ingested food is not described with words, instead it takes the shape of bodily
sensations and eventual reactions: tears, screams and vomitings or the spreading of a sense
of possession and power. It is as if the mouth that ingests the food immediately decides
either its resentment through the food’s rejection or its enjoyment through dissolution in its
entirety.
The words De Beauvoir uses to describe the foods are strongly material‐oriented. The
sensations that the materials evoked are also highly subjective. Each individual could
potentially react in a different manner to the recounted choice of foods. What is significant
for this research is that before it is even ingested, food has the potential to both repulse
and/or please depending on individual affinities and experiences. Through my artistic
practice I am investigating objects that have the potential to trigger memories of previous
experiences of sensations created through food inside the mouth. The potential of the
mouth to contain pleasure and repulsion at the same time is intriguing and drives my wish to
understand its nature. In the same way, the objects I create remain in this sensory threshold,
and oscillate between disgust and delight, to become both at the same time.

3.2.1 Affect
The theory of affect provides a background to frame the potentially shifting quality of
sensations which occur on a sensory level. Affect could be defined as those guttural
reactions or “pre‐individual bodily forces, linked to autonomic responses” (Clough) that De
Beauvoir described in relation to distaste. Academic Ben Highmore analyzes the every‐day in
his essays and delineates affect in similar words. “Affect gives you away: the telltale heart;
my clammy hands; the note of anger in your voice; the sparkle of glee in your eyes”
(Highmore 118). Affect is not carefully reflected. Affect takes place, and seems to be
governed, by the body alone. In his essay “Bitter After Taste” Highmore highlights the
inevitability of affective reactions in regards to distaste. In comparison to delight, the
reactions to distaste appear to be far more noticeable and radical. “After all distaste is not
simply disagreement: even in its mildest form it involves the wrinkling of noses, turning the
head away, and so on. At it’s most extreme, distaste is revolt, physical nausea, vomiting, and
retching” (Highmore 124). Food loathing provokes a reaction that is engrained in the body
and that is beyond the cognitive. The body acts because it is affected. In this context the

14

action of spitting could be considered among the qualifiers or symptoms that are associated
with distaste. Spitting is one of the creative gestures in my art work and is examined in
chapter 5. I make intentional use of this originally guttural reaction when I am using my
mouth as sculptural tool. The close contact between my mouth and the chewed material
entails a sensing of the materiality and its consistency. An interaction develops ‐ the slow
disintegration of a marshmallow sensed against the gums. Once spat out the chewed pieces
are submitted to an aesthetic selection. I determine which pieces best describe and
represent the sensations I want to elicit from the material.
Through the contact with the mouth, taste and consistency of an ingested food item
are sensed, the body is affected, then, forces shift and the body reacts, can reject, and spit.
The moment of transformation that manifests itself through spitting, for example, is a
moment of potential shifting and a generating condition for the artwork. In The Affect
Theory Reader Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg link this potential moment of
transformation to the notion of affect and ask: “How does a body, (…), come to shift its
affections (its being affected) into action (capacity to affect)?” (2) This leads to the following
question: What is the force that brings forth the transformation, the shifting?
Inside the mouth the potential to affect and be affected culminates. Inside the mouth
the potential to accept or reject is still open. The diagram below (Fig. 8) explains the
interaction that is put into motion through a transformative shift of forces inside the mouth.

Fig. 8: Patricia Huijnen, Interaction Diagram, 2012. Used by permission of the artist.

Situated in a neutral position in‐between terms, upon contact, the mouth acts on the bolus,
it bites. In turn the bolus affects the mouth, through its consistency for example. We can not
15

determine a specific sequence within this system of interactions. It is the moment of contact
that provokes a series of reactions. I imagine the interaction between the ingested food
bolus and the body’s taste receptors inside the mouth. What does their argument look,
sound or taste like? To summarize I would like to quote Seigworth and Gregg. They identify
that “affect arises in the midst of inbetween‐ness: in the capacities to act and be acted
upon” (Seigworth and Gregg 1). This inbetween‐ness is a moment of potential and
indeterminacy. The mouth, the way I understand it, contains a potentiality of sensations that
can oscillate into seemingly opposing strong reactions.
It is the potential to fluctuate and transform that is relevant for my work. During the
creative process of shaping an object there are moments of close alternation of affecting
and being affected, of destruction and creation:
While I am melting the wax for the Jawbreaker spheres, there is a moment where the colour
and texture of the melted wax just feels right. Pleasure. I associate it to milk and
cream ‐ the wax is fluid, dense white, pigmented. I pour the wax into the mold,
excited. I have to choose the right moment to extract the shape from the mold in
order to bite it. I bite on the partially cooled down wax, feel its softness and its
resistance in the mouth. I bite too hard and reach the liquid centre, wax splashes,
flows out of control. I stop immediately, look at the bite, let it cool down. I bite again,
wait for the moment of being affected, surprised, pleased by what takes place, then I
don’t touch it anymore.

Fig. 9. Patricia Huijnen, Jawbreaker, 2011‐2012, detail. Steel, wood, glass,
pigmented wax. 20x16x45 inch. Installation at Latitude 53, Edmonton.
Photo: Patricia Huijnen. Used by permission of the artist.

16

The intimacy of contact plays an important role in the use of the mouth as shaping tool. It is
through the close contact with the material that the destructive effect of chewing and biting
can be sensed as a formative gesture. They are formative in the sense that they induce
bodily reactions or sensations through the disintegration of the food. The disintegration of
the food is at the same time a material transformation that leaves its traces on it. Those
marks can be observed once the bitten and chewed piece is spat out. If the chewing and
biting process can be seen as formative in a physical way, the mouth can be considered as
sculptural tool, for modelling, cutting and molding.
The works Chewing and Spitting, Jawbreaker (Fig. 9) and Spoon are all physical
manifestations of bodily experiences or sensations. They suggest embodiment through the
impression of teeth that altered the original shape of the object. They suggest through their
openness and material ambiguity, form and content.

The next chapter explores how soft materials and chance contribute to the
suggestive potential of sculptures and analyzes how the mouth can be seen as mold.
Further, it examines the use of the mouth in the work of Alina Szapocznikow, Louise
Bourgeois and Janine Antoni.

Chapter 4. Biting and chewing matter

Once the matter is introduced to the mouth the shaping and treating of this substance
begins. It feels soft and is masticated and sculpted by teeth and tongue.

4.1 Material processes
With De Beauvoir’s vivid description of delightful and repulsive substances in mind, I
am examining Post‐minimalist material and gestural explorations to trace the relationship
between materials and a corporeal experience in art. In the 1960’s artists such as Eva Hesse,
Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, César and Lynda Benglis began experimenting with newly
available, often soft materials such as latex, rubber, industrial paint and expanding foam.
Similar to my explorations of malleable materials through chewing, those artists worked with
pouring, hanging or heaping gestures that revealed the autonomy of soft materials through

17

exposing their resistance or surrender to gravity. In works such as Totem from 1971 (Fig. 10)
American artist Lynda Benglis poured layers of polyurethane over wire mesh, until the
chemical reaction froze the free flowing shape. She fixed the sculpture to the wall and it
appeared as if frozen waves or immobilized streams reached towards the viewer’s body,
ready to engulf its space. In this installation the artist’s body is meeting the viewer’s body.
Benglis’ body determines the limit, size and scale of the sculpture. In an interview from 2011
she states: “I like the idea of scale: it’s always human. […] You can only throw as large as
your body allows.” (Benglis)4. In the same way as Benglis’ sculptures are limited by her
body’s strength to carry, throw or pour material, the chewed objects in my sculptures are
always related to the size of my mouth. I am playing with the body’s constraint as a
parameter for repetition. Generated from the same initial volume, a mouthful, the bitten
shapes are all different. Details in the repetitive process vary, such as the force of the bite,
the placement of the volume, the consistency of the material, and its autonomic reaction are
notions that we could call created by chance.
This material has been removed for copyright
restrictions. The image depicts an installation shot
of artist Lynda Benglis’ work Totem from 1971 at
Hayden Gallery, MIT, Boston. Four individually
poured shapes of pigmented polyurethane foam
are attached on different heights onto the gallery
walls. The image is sourced from “art 21”.
Online link to the image:
http://www.art21.org/images/lynda‐
benglis/totem‐1971

Fig. 10. Lynda Benglis, Totem, 1971. Iron oxide, Geigy Red, Radiante Red
and titanium white pigmented polyurethane foam (destroyed).
Hayden Gallery, MIT, Boston. Dimensions variable.

In his book Le mou et ses formes [The Soft and its Shapes]5 French art historian
Maurice Fréchuret asserts how, through the use of soft materials, doubt, chance and
instability became significant concepts in sculpture. He situates the intervention of chance
through soft materials within the lineage of artworks such as Three Standard Stoppages by

4
5

Quote stems from an interview with Alma Ruiz and Patrick Steffen, published in Artforum 2011, page 70.
Transl. by the author.

18

Marcel Duchamp from 1913‐14 and Surrealist sculptures such as Fur Cup from 1936 by
Meret Oppenheim.
In Three Standard Stoppages, Marcel Duchamp explored a soft material, a thread,
and its random reaction to gravity, while mimicking a scientific experiment. Under the title
“Idea of the Fabrication”, as stated on a note in the The Box of 1914, Duchamp established
mathematically framed guidelines for this work: “If a straight horizontal thread one meter
long falls from a height of one meter onto a horizontal plane distorting itself as it pleases [it]
creates a new shape of the measure of length” (Dalrymple‐Henderson 61). Duchamp
repeated this experiment three times, fixed the dropped threads on canvas and cut along
their trajectory to develop a set of profiles and create new measuring units. He used the
concept of chance to challenge the rational basis of the standard meter, which had been
intensely discussed in the 1880’s and is still preciously conserved in Sèvres, France.
Describing this work as “canned chance” in a note from the Green Box (Dalrymple‐
Henderson 61), Duchamp stresses the appropriation of chance as well as its subjectivity,
considering it as ‘his chance’6 in an interview with French art critic Pierre Cabanne published
in 1967 (Duchamp qtd. in Fréchuret 30).
Similar to Duchamp’s appropriation of the unit of the meter, I am questioning the
volume of a mouthful. Considered as variations on the concept of bolus the jawbreaker
spheres, that are slightly too big for the mouth, or the marshmallows, that have this uniform
tubular shape, are my take on the ‘disembodiedness’ of measurements. Through biting and
chewing I compare them to the size of the mouth. They become subjectively measured units,
tested by my own body.
The other reference that Fréchuret cited is surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim. In her
work Object from 1936 (Fig. 11) Oppenheim makes use of a soft material to evoke an
eroticised image of the female body (Fréchuret 96). Wrapped around a drinking cup the fur
evokes sensations at the site of the mouth that can be both sensual and repulsive. The use of
utilitarian objects and chance encounters of disparate elements in order to suggest bodily
sensations, mostly of a sexual nature, was conceptually and practically explored in surrealist
sculpture. Canadian art historian Steven Harris states that “the utilitarian object is estranged
from its normal use‐value in these surrealist objects” (Harris 160). Through its

6

Original text : “Cette experience fut faite en 1913 pour emprisonner et conserver des formes obtenues par le
hasard, par mon hasard” (Duchamp qtd. in Fréchuret 30).

19

transformation, the object becomes “disponible”, open “whether to an external solicitation
or an internal message” (32).

This material has been removed for copyright
restrictions. The image depicts artist Meret
Oppenheim’s work Object, a cup, spoon and saucer
covered in light brown fur and photographed on a
grey background. The image is sourced from the
collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Online link to the image:
http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id
=4416
Fig. 11. Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936. Fur‐covered cup, saucer, and spoon.
Cup 4 3/8" (10.9 cm) in diameter; saucer 9 3/8" (23.7 cm) in diameter; spoon 8"
(20.2 cm) long, overall height 2 7/8" (7.3 cm). MoMA.

Like the previously mentioned, Benglis, Duchamp and Oppenheim, I embrace the
suggestive power of chance. I use soft materials and found objects and relate them to the
body, through notions of size and shape and gesture. In Chewing and Spitting I chose a
specific bowl to contain the marshmallows. Its shape and size reminded me of the oral cavity
and its curled rim suggested lips. I used this bowl as a mold and multiplied it with ceramic
casting techniques, playing with the softness of the material.
The freshly poured porcelain bowl wobbles and collapses when I take it out of the mold too
early. Gravity pulls. I can not control the shape. I let it fall to stop it from moving.

The material investigation in my research is strongly guided by the corporeal
experience of chewing. I search for materials that behave similar to the way food softens
inside the mouth. Saliva, heat or chemical reactions influence marshmallows, wax, pewter,
and rubber and they proceed from solid to soft, viscous, liquid to a solid state again. I chew
marshmallows, spit them out and let them dry to harden. I heat wax, bite and let it cool
down again. It is important that at some point the material softens, becomes malleable,
shows its own forming potential and then solidifies to hold its shape. The interpretation and
suggestive power of the object changes according to the material chosen.

20

Fig. 12. Patricia Huijnen, Spoon, Experiments, 2010. Sugar, wax.
Dimensions variable. Photo: Elisa Ferrari.
Used by permission of Elisa Ferrari.

The material research in my work Spoon (Fig. 12) for example took different
iterations, and with every change in material, the intention of the work became clearer. The
first versions of Spoon were cast in caramel and sugar. Chocolate was ruled out because I
could not interfere with the hardening process and bite or chew it. Boiling, melting sugar ‐
caramel and hard candy were next choices.
While the caramel or boiled sugar is still soft and warm, I can deform it directly with my
mouth. I take the cast spoon out of its mold, it curls around my finger, I push it
towards the mouth and bite it. I feel the caramel around my teeth, it tastes sweet,
warm, almost burning. Saliva collects under my tongue. The caramel hardens, I pull
on the spoon to take it out. I pull harder, the caramel stretches ‐ it feels as if my teeth
are stuck to the spoon ‐ and detaches. The sugar spoon versions are translucent,
stretchy, soft, sticky and after a while, through the influence of humidity in the air,
they become liquid. The impression of the teeth on the spoon is fluid, ephemeral.

This evanescent character of Spoon did not fit with the rather violent action of biting it.
A moment of failure. Wax is the next option. The traces of biting and chewing on the spoon
are clearer and remain. But the material still looks too soft, too fragile. To embody
the violence of the biting action, the spoon needs to be cast in metal. In the pewter
version of Spoon, the chewed parts look melted, the traces of the teeth are too close
to the metals solidified flow. Finally I decide to bite the spoon and tear a part off. A
wax mode, is cast in bronze. It looks bitten, not chewed and not melted.

21

Fig. 13. Patricia Huijnen, Spoon, 2011. Pewter. 10x3x1 inch. Photo: Patricia Huijnen.
Used by permission of the artist.

Depending on the material chosen the impression of the mold will vary in its openness or
precision; it will react differently to the mouth‐mold. Molding is a technique where material
and form come into contact and interact to form an impression.

Fig. 14. Patricia Huijnen, Spoon, 2010‐2011,
detail. Bronze. 10x3x1 inch. Installation at
Latitude 53, Edmonton. Photo: Patricia Huijnen.
Used by permission of the artist.

22

4.2 The mouth as mold
In “Archaeology, Anachronism and Modernity of the Imprint” French art historian
Georges Didi‐Huberman defines how technique and chance both inform the “unexpected,
precarious, open” character of an impression (Didi‐Huberman 18). Didi‐Huberman refers to
the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon and his theory on the technical object. According
to Simondon the degree of perfection of a technical object is dependent on the stability of
its results (18). The shaping process of the produced result takes place inside of the technical
system. An example is Simondon’s description of basic molding techniques used in pottery,
such as the impression of clay onto the surface of a mold. He describes casting as a process
which is prepared by the artist, but the impression of the material onto the surface of the
mold takes place out of his control. It is not the worker that gives the clay its shape, but it is
the clay which takes the shape of the mold (19). Simondon describes that one would have to
be able to enter the mold with the clay, become clay and mold in order to experience their
interaction and reflect on the shaping process itself (18‐19). In its essence, the imprint is the
result of an encounter, an encounter between tyche and techne: chance, coincidence and
technique that the artist has to take into account (18). I embrace this open outcome of the
printing process; never knowing exactly what will unfold. Embracing chance in a certain way
allows for loss of control and being surprised by an outcome. It is a way of detaching the
produced objects from my intentions and regarding them as separate entities.
I consider the mouth as a mold. It produces imprints which retain the openness
Simondon is referring to, because the moment of impression takes place hidden from sight.
The result of the chewing process can only be seen once the material is spat out, but the
process can be felt and experienced within the body. The ongoing destruction of the
material with every bite can be experienced and stopped, interjected. Using the mouth as
mold is on the one hand a surrender from control exercised by vision. On the other hand,
the contact between the material and the mold is sensed through tongue and internal skin
and the body becomes the mold that feels the shaping process from within. For me it is the
body that senses and constructs the knowledge about the shaping process. In this way it
becomes a bodily experience that can be seen as personal or embodied and related to the
construction of sensory knowledge.

23

4.3 The mouth as tool in sculpture by female artists
The direct use of the body as a sculptural tool or place has been experienced and
discussed in feminist art practices and theories especially in the late 1960’s and 1970’s.
Through performances involving the inside and outside of the body and notions of disgust,
female artists from the 1970’s reclaimed the body as a space of their own. I am referring for
example to Carolee Schneeman’s performance Interior Scroll from 1975, where she stood
naked on a table, covered with mud and slowly extracted a paper scroll from her vagina
while reading from it, Hannah Wilke who in 1974 in her photographic work S.O.S —
Starification Object Series placed chewing gum, formed and folded into vaginal shapes, onto
her nude breasts, arms, or back, or Eleanor Antin’s work Carving: A Traditional Sculpture
from 1972. She photographically documented her loss of 10 pounds over 37 days and
referred to the traditional process of historical greek sculptors, “chipping away at a block of
marble and discarding any unnecessary material” (“Eleanor Antin”).
I situate my practice within a tradition of works that function within a female
sensibility related to the use of the body as a sculptural tool, but where the performative
element happens in private. The artists I chose to contextualize my work with, do not all
relate to the body in an explicit feminist way, but relate to psychic and sensual experiences
of their own body. Alina Szapocznikow worked with molds of body parts in the 1960’s and
early 70’s in Paris and was concerned with questions of embodiment before feminist
theories and writing on the écriture féminine, such as “Le Rire de Meduse”7 by Hélène Cixous
published in 1975, were developing (Chmielewksi 40, 44). In 1974, Louise Bourgeois, already
a practicing artist for more than 30 years (Crone, Graf Schaesberg 33‐39), realized her work
The Destruction of the Father, exposing a personal narrative in a context where young
female artists, as mentioned above, were engaging in feminist art practices. Janine Antoni
deliberately posits her work Gnaw, exhibited in 1992, in a feminist context, referencing
feminist art performances through using the body as sculptural tool.
The following analysis of specific works by Alina Szapocznikow, Louise Bourgeois and
Janine Antoni focuses on how the use of the mouth as a sculptural tool is considered,
materialized and contextualized through their work. The cited artists refer to relevant
psychoanalytic concepts, such as the development of subjectivity in Louise Bourgeois’s work

7

Trans: The Laugh of Medusa

24

and the concept of desire, in Alina Szapocznikow’s and Janine Antoni’s work, but this will not
be analyzed to a deeper extent within the framework of this essay.

4.3.1 Alina Szapocznikow Petit Dessert I and Photosculptures
Alina Szapocznikow was a Polish sculptor who, after a career as a traditional
figurative sculptor, began experimenting with newly available materials in the 1960’s, such
as polyester resins and expanding foams. The relation to her body is permanent in her work
and deeply informed by her experience in Nazi internment camps during the Second World
War and later on by her illness. While living and working in Paris, Szapocznikow writes an
artist statement in 1972, sent to French art critic Pierre Restany, co‐founder with artist Yves
Klein of the Nouveaux Réalistes group.
As for me, I produce awkward objects […] Through casts of the body I try to fix the
fleeting moments of life, its paradoxes and absurdity, in transparent polyester. My
work is difficult, as sensation that is felt in a very immediate and diffuse way is often
resistant to identification. […] Despite everything, I persist in trying to fix in resin the
traces of our body. (Szapocznikow)8
I specifically relate her description of diffuse and immediate embodied sensations that
remain difficult to name to my investigation around affect in chapter 3.2.1. Sensations can
remain in a state of neutrality and slowly shift in a direction that can not be immediately
categorized until visible reactions are provoked. For Szapocznikow the repetitive casting of
the body is a way to materialize the indeterminacy of sensations and render them tangible.
Szapocznikow often worked with tinted polyester resin casts of her own legs, belly, lips or
breasts, “creating multiple casts of her own anatomy, with a distinct preference for erotically
charged parts” (Chmielewski 42), to transform them, sometimes into objects with utilitarian
functions, such as lamps or pillows. In her essay “Alina Szapocnikow and her Sculpture of
Plastic Impermanence” art historian Amy Chmielewski states that, informed by Surrealism
and the use of utilitarian objects in art by the Nouveaux Réalistes, Szapocznikow “explored
objecthood not through mass produced goods, but by objectifying the human form” (42).
The casts she makes are fragmented, not mass produced, and keep the traces of her own
body. Even though sometimes framed as utilitarian objects Szapocznikow’s representations
of the human body remain ambiguous, appear unstable, multiple, impermanent, eroticised
8

Alina Szapocznikow’s statement “My work has its roots” is published in Jakubowska, Agata, ed. Alina
Szapocznikow Awkward Objects. Warsaw, Poland: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2011, p. 13.

25

and anxious at the same time. Seducing, they evoke a disturbing after taste in the viewer.
Art critic Jan Verwoert writes about the ambivalent representation of the mouth in her work:
The delicious joys of the mouth! But also, alas, the curse of having a mouth! Filled
with the bitter taste of memories one chokes on; a melancholy mouth that neither
swallows nor spits things out but continues chewing, dismembering the
remembered, in a ceaseless grinding motion of the teeth. […] Cast in bronze, cement,
polyester or polyurethane, [Szapocznikow’s] mouth is many mouths. Like
autonomous, disembodied, strangely alive beings, these mouths populate the world
of her sculptures; with their sensuous, often luminescent lips, they present ports of
entry to a body of work that speaks of sweetest ecstasy as much as of terrifying pain.
To look at Szapocznikow’s work is to look at sculpture in oral terms. (Verwoert)
Verwoert emphasizes the autobiographical content and the omnipresence of the mouth in
her works. It is a mouth that at the same time fragments, cuts apart and through castings
becomes itself a sculpture. The mouth is the creator and the created, both at the same time.
To stress the double role of the mouth in Szapocznikow’s work I am discussing Petit Dessert I
(Fig. 15) and Photosculptures (Fig. 16).
In the Dessert series from 1970‐71, Szapocznikow places plastic casts of breasts and
lips, tinted with fleshy and appealing red colours, on glass bowls and dessert cups, “like
scoops of exotically flavoured ice cream” (44). Lips and breast are compared to sweet
desserts and function as a sensualized referent for the viewer. Szapocznikow contextualizes
her casts using utilitarian objects, glass dishware and thus situates the body within a
consumable, utilitarian realm, similar to Surrealist sculptural practices that problematize the
everyday. In Petit Dessert I (Small Dessert I), a cast of her mouth and chin is placed on a
yellow shape of soft plastic that seems to flow out of the glass dish containing both. As a cast
duplicate of her own body, the mouth is represented in a figurative way. The appealing look
of the cast body part is combined with a shapeless, informal blob of bright yellow plastic.
Both are made of the same industrial, artificial material but convey disparate connotations:
pleasure and distaste, containment and excess.

26

This material has been removed for copyright
restrictions. The image depicts the work Petit
Dessert I by artist Alina Szapocznikow. I consists in
a coloured polyester resin cast of a mouth and
chin on a yellow polyester resin shape, both
placed within a glass bowl. The image is sourced
from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Online link to the image:
http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibi
tion_id/212

Fig. 15. Alina Szapocznikow, Petit Dessert I, 1970‐1971. Colored
polyester resin and glass. 3 (8 x 11 x 13 cm). Kravis Collection.

In contrast to Szapocznikow’s representation of her own body my art takes a less
manifest eroticized position. In Petit Dessert I Szapocznikow depicts the body. I evoke the
body. My work appeals to the sense of taste through a deliberate choice of materials, such
as marshmallows, but remains in an indexical relationship to the body through the
impression of traces. Like Szapocznikow, I use functional objects that relate to the female
body. I choose to work with domestic objects such as spoons or bowls because they are
reminiscent of the nourishing and containing function of the female body. But then I
transform them and render them obsolete. The bitten Spoon for example bears the traces of
its partial consumption and rejection.
In her work Photosculptures from 1971, Szapocznikow makes use of the sculptural
capacities of the mouth. Her artwork consists in a series of 20 blown up black and white
photographs of chewed gum. In a text from 1971, exhibited together with one of the
photographs, she describes her process:
The other day, Saturday, tired from having spent hours polishing my Rolls‐Royce in
pink Portuguese marble, I sat in the sun and day‐dreamed as I mechanically chewed a
bit of gum. In shaping with my mouth odd‐looking and bizarre forms, I suddenly
realized what an extraordinary collection of abstract sculptures was moving between
my teeth. One has only to photograph and enlarge my masticated creations in order
to achieve a sculptural presence. Chew well then. Look around you. Creation lies just
between dreams and daily work. (Szapoznikow)9
9

The English translation of the original French document, published online in the Alina Szapoznikow Archive of
the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, is taken from Manuela Ammer “ ‘My American Dream’: Alina
Szapocznikow’s take on Conceptual Art” published in Jakubowska, p. 158.

27

This material has been removed for
copyright restrictions. The image
depicts one black and white
photograph of the Photosculptures
series by artist Alina Szapocznikow: a
chewed and stretched gum sticking
partially to the edge of a thin shelf. The
image is sourced from the Alina
Szapocznikow Archive at the Museum
of Modern Art in Warsaw.
Online link to the image:
http://www.artmuseum.pl/archiwa.ph
p?l=1&a=1&skrot=515

Fig. 16. Alina Szapocznikow, Photosculptures, 1971.
B/w photographs, 21 parts: 24 x 30 cm each.

Szapocznikow describes the mouth as a transitional place, such as described in chapter
three, where forms and shapes are constantly moving, appearing and disappearing, through
the repetitive work of jaw and teeth. The mouth becomes a creator of abstract sculptures. In
her text “My American Dream: Alina Szapocznikow’s take on conceptual art” writer and
curator Manuela Ammer comments that “instead of passively lending its shape and texture
to the material imprinted upon, however, the mouth took on the active role of the
‘unconscious, gustatory, and sensual executor’10 of a process the hands no longer wish to be
accountable for” (153). Ammer emphasizes the sensory aspect of the mouth that, as
described in the section “The mouth as mold”, becomes the symbol of a surrender of
control. Szapocznikow creates the sculptural aspect of the pieces of gum through the
photographic medium and the change in scale. Through scaling up, she removes the direct
reference to the body and transforms it, distances it, to enhance the formal and material
qualities of the gum‐sculpture. In my work, I directly reference the scale of the mouth and
work within the constraints of its limitations in size. The mouth, its containment and its
spillings, become the subject of my work and its sensual perception my guide.
10

Quote from Urszula Czartoryska, “The Cruel Clarity” in Alina Szapocznikow. 1926‐1973, Warsaw: Galeria
Zacheta, 1998, p. 21.

28

4.3.2 Louise Bourgeois The Destruction of the Father
Working in different mediums, from drawings to large scale sculpture and
installations, artist Louise Bourgeois’s work is strongly autobiographic and refers amongst
others to childhood memories, emotions and the female body. In her work The Destruction
of the Father from 1974 (Fig. 17), Bourgeois transformed a fantasy description of eating her
father into a sculptural installation. Bourgeois created a mouth‐like environment, with
protruding teeth‐like shapes, stool sized placed around and above a table‐like horizontal
surface covered with organic objects cast from animal limbs. Wrapped with fabric the
installation resembles a large cave and is lit by a hidden red light.

This material has been removed for copyright
restrictions. The image depicts Louise Bourgeois’
work The Destruction of the Father, an installation of
round protruding stool‐like shapes, wrapped with
fabric and placed around and above a table covered
with organic forms and lit by a hidden red lamp. The
image is sourced from the Hermitage Museum.
Online link to the image:
http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/13/hm1
3_2_001_6.html
Fig. 17. Louise Bourgeois, The Destruction of the Father, 1974. Plaster,
latex, wood, fabric, red light. 93 5/8 x 142 5/8 x 97 7/8 in.
(237.8 x 362.3 x 248.6 cm).

Bourgeois recalls the childhood fantasy behind the work with the following words:
What frightened me was that at the dinner table, my father would go on and on,
showing off, aggrandizing himself. And the more he showed off, the smaller we felt.
Suddenly there was a terrific tension, and we grabbed him and pulled him onto the
table and pulled his legs and arms apart – dismembered him, right? And we were so
successful in beating him up that we ate him up. Finished. It is a fantasy. (Bourgeois
158)
This mise‐en‐scène of the fantasy represents the mouth in a quite literal but oversized way.
In the fantasy biting and eating are seen as violent and destructive actions that are at the
origin of sculptural work. In her essay “Bad Enough Mother” art historian Mignon Nixon
states that “the desire to eat the father and to eat his words is (…) turned into the desire for
sculptural solutions or, we could say, for object solutions” (75). A sculptural solution being in
29

Bourgeois’ terms “one that performs an aggressive or desiring operation on an object”
(Nixon 75).
In this daydream, eating and biting happen as a reaction to the heightening words
spoken by the father figure. The reply to the father is a bite rather than another set of
words. Nixon states that “in this fantasy of devouring the father, eating takes the place of
naming in a substitution of oral sadism for speech” (74). She relates this act back to
psychoanalytic theories developed by Melanie Klein around oral sadism and its role in
subjectivity formation. “Performed under the title The Destruction of the Father, this critique
of Lacan through Klein, framed as an attack on language through biting, on Oedipal naming
through pre‐Oedipal sadism, stages an assault on patriarchy from the infantile position” (75).
The act of biting is framed as an attack on language and through that generates an inversion
of hierarchies that adds another layer of meaning to the bite in relation to existing
structures.
Bourgeois’ room‐filling installation also recreates a ritualistic space that exposes an
act of transformation. The work itself had a transforming effect on Bourgeois, similar to the
transforming action of the bite. She writes that “with The Destruction of the Father, the
recall was so strong, and it was such a lot of work, that I felt a different person. I felt as if it
had existed. It really changed me” (Bourgeois 158). The transformative quality of the
creative process that I described in chapter two appears in Bourgeois’ sculpture through a
psychological, confrontational process.
In my work Spoon the violent aspect of the bite can be interpreted as a similar silent
revolution that crosses a boundary and affects beyond its limits. Bourgeois describes the act
of biting in a fantasy, but I use it directly on an object. In my work biting is a constantly
repeated gesture, framed as research to materialize sensed experiences. Contextualized
within table‐like structures the chewed objects are parts of sculptural constructs that
embody the unstable, shifting and transformative quality of sensations.

30

4.3.3 Janine Antoni Gnaw
Janine Antoni is a contemporary artist whose work focuses mostly on the
transformation of everyday activities into process‐based artworks that involve the use of her
own body or singular parts of it such as her eyelashes, hair and mouth. In her work Gnaw
from 1992 (Fig. 18 and 19) Janine Antoni uses the biting as a sculptural gesture and refers to
representations of aggression and destruction as well as feminine desire and consumption.
Antoni’s work consists of two cubes, one made of 600 pounds of chocolate and the other
one made of the same amount of lard as well as a display of heart shaped, chocolate candy
boxes and lipsticks.

Fig. 18. Janine Antoni, Gnaw, 1992. 600 lbs. of chocolate gnawed by the artist (24 x 24 x 24 inches);
600 lbs. of lard, gnawed by the artist (24 X 24 X 24 inches); 45 heart‐shaped packages for chocolate
made from chewed chocolate removed from the chocolate cube and 400 lipsticks made with pigment,
beeswax and chewed lard removed from the lard cube. Dimensions variable. Installation shot (LA MOCA).
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Each of the cubes has been chiselled by the artist’s mouth11 in the privacy of her studio.
Antoni carved the cubes with her teeth, gnawing and biting, and spitting the bitten parts out.
The material removed in the sculpting process was then recast: the left over chocolate was
formed into 45 heart shaped chocolate boxes and the rest of lard was transformed with
added pigment and beeswax into 400 lipsticks. Those “objects of conventionalized feminine
desire” were then displayed in a room at the front of the gallery (Nixon 78).

11

See the e‐mail of a representative of the Luhring‐Augustine Gallery in the appendices.

31

The gnawed sculptures strongly relate to an internal, obsessive or even destructive
consumption due to the use of chocolate and lard, the traces of teeth on the cubes and the
sheer amount of material. The heart shaped chocolate boxes and the lipsticks refer to
consumer desire, excess, packaging and according to art historian Mignon Nixon their
process of creation mirrors “the struggle to suppress aggression or to repair its perceived
effects” (78). The clear separation in the installation of the work between the bitten cubes
and the transformed consumer objects, suggests a binary interpretation of opposing forces
at work between inside and outside, aggression and make up. But both underscore the “idea
of artificially induced desire”, chocolate through “phenylethylamine, a chemical produced by
the brain when one falls in love”, and lipstick through its use as feminine beauty product
(Iannacci).
To contextualize my practice I am focusing on the gnawed cubes in Antoni’s work
because they relate to the use of the bite in ways that are present in my own works. Antoni
describes her interest in the bite in the following terms:
I call the piece Gnaw because I'm interested in the bite as a kind of primal urge. I love
to look at a little baby when they put everything in their mouth in order to know it,
and through that process, they destroy it. I was interested in the bite because it was
both intimate and destructive. It summed up my relationship to art history. I feel
attached to my artistic heritage and I want to destroy it. It defined me as an artist,
and it excludes me as a woman, both at the same time. (Antoni, MoMA)
This quote lays out the push and pull inherent in the bite between intimacy, attachment and
destruction. The tension apparent in the ambiguity of the bite is what interests me. In Gnaw
the traces of teeth on the cubes are so detailed and intimate that the viewer can imagine the
sensation of the bite and the saturation through the amount of chocolate and lard in his/her
own mouth. Antoni’s use of chocolate and lard as materials emphasizes the suggestion of
the body and the sensations both of pleasure and disgust in relation to food. Carving and
biting the chocolate cube for hours exceeds what one could bear, and what tasted sweet at
first becomes an enduring and destructive task.

32

Fig. 19. Janine Antoni, Gnaw, 1992. 600 lbs. of chocolate gnawed by
the artist (24 x 24 x 24 inches). Installation shot (LA MOCA).
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

To shape the cubes Antoni used her mouth to sculpt in a way a traditional sculptor
would carve a figure out of a stone or wood block. In her work it is both, the carved shape
that is of importance, but primarily the process itself, the traces of the mouth‐tool on the
material. Antoni describes the different steps of the creation of the work with the following
words: “So, my cubes are poured, chewed, spit out, melted down and recast. They've really
been in intimate contact with my body and really carry the traces of my body on them”
(Antoni, MoMA). The everyday gestures of chewing and spitting become part of an intimate
formative process. Listed among other traditional sculpting techniques, such as pouring and
casting, they become part of them. In that sense Antoni integrates the acts of chewing and
spitting within a traditional artistic realm. Placed on marble pedestals, the gnawed cubes are
elevated in the way a traditional sculpture is poised on a plinth. On the other hand Antoni
uses the destructive aspect of biting and spitting to attack the cube, a stable geometric form
that in my eyes represents art history through referencing Minimalist sculpture for example.
The simultaneously destructive and intimate process, the biting, mastication and
spitting‐out, present in each of these cubes, can be seen as an attack upon the
intransigent geometry and rationality of [M]inimalism. Antoni underlines the fact
that while her [M]inimalist forefathers strived to attain a mute or language‐less aura
around their work meant to invoke a transcendent, universal experience, she literally
fills her mouth with the artificiality of the cube to redirect our attention to her body
with this activity. (Iannacci)

33

In my work Spoon I refer to a similar tension. I juxtapose a traditional, universal
artistic material, bronze, and a personal, intimate, and destructive gesture, the bite. In
Spoon, an everyday gesture is fixed and elevated into an art historical realm, without losing
its destructive effect.
I find important to point out that after a certain time in the exhibition the lard cube
was further transformed and gave in to heat and gravity to collapse into a heap. The material
lost its cast shape and the started destruction through the bite continued. A moment of
unexpectedness entered the work that could even be considered a failure that relates to
Post‐Minimalist sculptural explorations described in section 4.1.
In my work I would like to capture such moments of potential disintegration or
failure. In Chewing and Spitting the bowls that contain the chewed marshmallows are
partially collapsing. I developed their shape through technical failure. I took them out of
their molds too early, to let them fall and collapse.
In contrast to Antoni’s work, the shapes I chew and transform are taken from the
every‐day, they are existing objects that I encounter and associate with the mouth. In
relation to scale, my sculptures stay in a constant close relationship to the mouth. I sculpt
the chewed pieces with my mouth and spit them out for observation. While Antoni chews on
cubes of the size of 24 by 24 by 24 inches, the mouthful, or potential bolus, as volume and
measure of the real scale of the body is a permanent concept in my work.

The mouth is as sculptural tool inherently limited in its capacity of giving shape ‐ be it
either through casting, biting, chewing or licking. There is only so much it can do and only a
specific volume that can be treated. Similar to an experimental laboratory setting the same
basic parameters with changing materials, colours or shapes are reused, re‐tested and re‐
experimented. Using those constraints as meaningful constituents means that the repetition,
the search for difference, is engrained in my work. I utilize molding and casting techniques to
generate difference rather than a multiplicity of the same. I relate to Helen Molesworth,
chief curator at The Wexner Center for the Arts, as she describes artist’s approaches to the
sculptural works that were part of the Part Object Part Sculpture exhibition from 2005: “[the
artist’s works offer] a series of imperfect vessels, cast objects filled with the matter of their
own making, surfaces resistant to words” (Molesworth 25).

34

The cast objects I produce are imperfect in the way that they are hand made, or
rather ‘mouth made’, they have been in contact with my body. The potential to produce a
divergent multiplicity, drives the reproduction, the repetition. The objects are vessels in the
way that they contain a materiality, and the traces of their making ‐ the traces of teeth are
engrained in their shape. The chewed objects expose an experience that language can not
articulate, but that can be sensed by the body. Spat out the chewed objects contain the
traces of their creation. They are affected and affect in return.

5. Spitting

Spitting is externalizing. The inside experience is transferred to the outside. Splash.
In 1929 French writer Georges Bataille published an entry in his Critical Dictionary12
on the “Informe” [formless], relating it to spit.
Thus formless is not only an adjective with a given meaning but a term which
declassifies, generally requiring that each thing take on a form. […]To declare […] that
the universe is not like anything, and is simply formless, is tantamount to saying the
universe is something like a spider or spittle. (Bataille)
In his dictionary, Bataille intended to invert and question the hierarchical position of ‘form’
and ‘content’ in modernist thought and provide not the meaning of words, but what they do
(Bois 28). I agree with Bataille’s concept of considering the operating potential of terms. The
term formless brings things down, in the same way as spit can be perceived as something
low, due to its loss of form. I consider the use of chewing and spitting in my artistic process
as transforming the disintegrating action of those gestures into a formative potential. It is in
a way expanding the boundaries of the concept of form or annihilating it.
Bataille’s article was followed by two entries on “Spittle”: “Spittle Soul” by Marcel
Giraule and “Mouth Water” by Michel Leiris (Bois 25 and Faccini 29‐30). In his entry on
spittle as “Mouth Water” ethnographer and Surrealist writer Michel Leiris points out the
functions of the mouth traditionally conceived in terms of high and low.
Just below the eyes, the mouth occupies a privileged position because it is both locus
of speech and respiratory orifice. It is considered the cave where the pact of the kiss
12

Bataille published his Critical Dictionary in the journal Documents edited by himself from 1929 to 1930.

35

is sealed rather than the oily factory of mastication. […] Spittle, on the other hand,
casts the mouth in one fell swoop down to the last rung of the organic ladder,
lending it a function of ejection even more repugnant than its role as gate through
which one stuffs food. (Leiris)
Leiris points to the common origin of spoken words and spit writing about the ambivalence
of the mouth. Evoking the “incongruous image of a spluttering orator” Leiris brushes against
the established hierarchies of his time. I compare my artwork to those little drops of spit that
sputter out of the mouth while speaking and bring back spoken words to a bodily realm.
Further I consider spitting as an action of transfer and contextualization that in my sculptural
process is a continuation of the biting and chewing gestures. While eating, the mouth has
the potential to either accept and swallow or reject and spit out. The question of what
causes rejection or assimilation, of what shifts affection into action, remains open for each
individual as we have seen in De Beauvoir’s quotes. It also remains open to the viewer of my
work to create their own associations of pleasure or revulsion, while observing the bodily
traces on the chewed objects. Essential to me is the formative moment that happens when
affection shifts to action and action to affection. Spitting is a gesture that makes the
formative moment that happens inside the mouth visible. Spitting transfers the object,
shape or material from the inside out. It is a shifting from one context to another.
In her essay “Happy Objects” Sara Ahmed discusses the contagious aspect of affect or
feelings and points out that “to be affected by another does not mean that affect simply
passes or ‘leaps’ from one body to another. The affect becomes an object only given the
contingency of how we are affected” (Ahmed 36). In my sculptures I am trying to transfer
the potential or the possibility of shifting affecting moments. To contextualize the bitten
parts within my sculptures I use notions of instability and imbalance, of fragility and chance.
In my work Chewing and Spitting for example the bowls that are supposed to contain the
chewed marshmallows are rounded at the bottom, they are unstable; some tip over, others
collapse. The irregularity of the heaped fabric on the table enhances this effect, but at the
same time provides a soft support. A multiplicity of nuanced interactions between the
bowls, the cloth and the chewed marshmallows takes place. The bowls seem nicely tucked in
or are they squeezed or even crushed by the weight of the fabric material? Some fall, when I
install the work; there is always a certain amount of breakage. Imbalanced, some bowls just
roll down the table. Further the heaped cover on the tea table engulfs the whole table
surface, it disappears under this excessively spread out material. Just the legs stand out.
36

Curved towards the inside they come together in the center and seem to be squeezed
together. This adds to the feeling of imbalance between the different forces that are at work
in the sculpture.
Constructed from different elements that contextualize each other, such as the
marshmallows, bowls, the soft fabric and the table in Chewing and Spitting, my works also
refer to the important art historical discourse concerning sculpture and its support. Sculptor
Constantin Brancusi (1876 – 1957) made this complex relationship a consistent theme in his
work; one that still challenges sculptors, and myself as an artist, today. In her essay
“Sculpture in the Expanded Field” art historian, theorist and critic Rosalind Krauss discusses
the nomadic characteristic of modernist sculpture and its detachment from a site specific
context, by using Brancusi’s art as an example. “Through its fetishization of the base, the
sculpture reaches downward to absorb the pedestal into itself and away from actual place;
and through the representation of its own materials or the process of its construction, the
sculpture depicts its own autonomy” (Krauss, Expanded 34). Krauss describes for example
how in Brancusi’s work Cock the base becomes “the morphological generator of the
figurative part of the object” or how in Endless Column “the sculpture is all base” (34). Often
constructing the base of the figurative part with piled and stacked modular forms Brancusi
considers the interaction of all the elements through contrasts of texture, shape and colour
(Krauss, Passages 99 and Temkin).
Choosing to work with table‐like structures to contextualize the bitten objects I
create I am experimenting with different variations within my sculptures. To me it is a
challenging process of trials and failures until the different components enter a relationship
that enhances their respective qualities. The chewed spheres of Jawbreaker for example are
placed on a glass surface that highlights the balancing effect of the spheres. It’s thinness in
comparison to the height of the stilt metal structure accentuates their fragility.

37

Fig. 20. Patricia Huijnen, Jawbreaker, 2011‐2012. Steel,
wood, glass, pigmented wax. 20x16x45 inch. Installation
at studio. Photo: Patricia Huijnen. Used by permission
of the artist.

Through this research project undertaken in the past two years I have come to
understand the suggestive power of my work and its relationship to sculptural practice. In
the future I am interested in refining the potential of my work’s poetic and expressive
impact. New directions include the exploration of different ways to contextualize my work
outside of conventional art gallery spaces by, for example, creating sculptures that respond
to, and inform social‐history related museological settings, such as in works by Susan Hiller,
Mark Dion and Fred Wilson. I am envisioning works that could be situated amongst historical
artefacts to intervene in or subvert this environment, as a way to bring the body and its
unstable, indefinite sensations into contexts that seem void of it and integrate concepts of
personal and situated ways of knowing within seemingly universal ones.
The mouth and its gestures of biting, chewing and spitting related to sculpture’s
provocative and sensual potential remains an ongoing investigation for relating the body to
creation of form and exploring its expressive possibilities.

38

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Appendices

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Excerpt of e‐mail correspondence with Luhring‐Augustine representative Caroline Burghardt:

45