In her series Lick Line, artist Julia Randall manages to create extremely revealing, intimate pieces through showing one part of the body in isolation. By simply using colouring pencils on paper, Randall has rendered hyper-realistic mouths that float in blank space, disembodied from any subject. In doing this, the artist forces the viewer to focus on what a crucial feature the mouth is- the site of speech, kissing, eating- and its simultaneous resiliency and fragility.
Randall’s work also seems to play with the idea that the longer and closer you look at a familiar object, the more strange and alien it can appear- taken out of their typical context, the mouths almost seem grotesque. But with each of them poised in mid-action, when presented together Randall’s work is almost a collective of ghostly voices talking and babbling to the audience.
