The open mouth: a study in silence and speech

The mouth is rarely neutral. Even when it hangs slack in sleep, even when it has forgotten how to form a sentence, it carries the residue of every word it has shaped. To make work about an open mouth is to step into a charged territory where expression and repression live in the same gesture. A mouth can plead, confess, swallow, and sing. It can also remain obstinately shut, and that stubbornness can be louder than any utterance. This study begins at the hinge between those two states, where silence is not the absence of speech but its concentrated form.

For an artist working across sculpture, video and installation, the open mouth offers a site that is both anatomical and architectural. It is a doorway in the body, an aperture through which interior becomes exterior. Working with it as a subject means accepting the difficulty of representing what cannot be said, and the equal difficulty of saying too much. The pages that follow trace the contours of that difficulty, drawing on local conditions in Australia, where questions of voice, country and censorship shape how a mouth is permitted to open.

The body as a threshold

A threshold is not a wall. It is an invitation to cross, a margin that admits passage while marking its limit. The mouth is the body's most ancient threshold, the one we cross first when we arrive in the world and the one that holds us in conversation with whatever comes next. In the studio, working with the open mouth often begins with this idea of passage. A cast lip becomes a doorway in plaster. A video loop shows breath drawn in and let out without a single word. A sound piece catches the small wet sounds of a swallow. None of these gestures announce themselves as speech, yet each insists on the possibility of it.

There is a quiet politics in how a body holds itself open. Visitors to recent exhibitions at Carriageworks or the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Southbank may have noticed how artists working with the figure now treat the mouth less as a feature to be rendered and more as an event to be staged. The mouth is something that happens. It opens in grief, in hunger, in the long pause before a difficult admission. To render it accurately means attending to those conditions rather than to the geometry of lips.

Australian audiences are particularly attuned to this kind of attention. We live with the evidence of thresholds every day: in the Acknowledgement of Country that opens gatherings, in the cleared land around a meeting place, in the framed silence that precedes a Welcome to Country. These rituals depend on the mouth opening in a particular way, at a particular pace. They ask the listener to slow down and to recognise that what is being said has been carried, unsaid, for a long time.

The censored mouth and self-editing

Every open mouth has, somewhere behind it, a memory of being closed. Censorship operates in two directions at once. There is the censor who forbids a sentence, and there is the speaker who decides, before the words arrive, not to risk them. The work of art that concerns itself with the open mouth has to register both forces, and the weariness they leave on a face. Self-editing is a quiet form of self-harm. It happens in the rehearsal of every interview, in the careful wording of every public statement, in the long arithmetic of what a body is willing to pay for the words it wants to say.

This matters in Australia with a particular intensity. The country has a long history of voices being suppressed, from the silencing of Aboriginal languages under assimilation policies to the contemporary policing of dissent around refugee policy, including the offshore processing regimes on Manus Island and Nauru. Each generation inherits a different version of what can be safely spoken. To make a sculpture of an open mouth here is to acknowledge that the mouth in question is, almost inevitably, also a closed one.

The work does not need to declare this. It can simply hold the lip, the tongue, the small dark interior, and let the viewer feel the weight of what is not arriving. There is an honesty in the unfinished sentence, in the mouth that opens and then reconsiders. The piece becomes a record of hesitation, which is closer to truth than certainty ever manages.

Mourning, keening and the unsayable

When a person loses someone, the first sound is often not a word. It is a breath caught at the top of the chest, or a low sound that comes from somewhere below language. In many traditions this inarticulate sound has a name. In some First Nations communities in Australia, the practice of mourning involves specific vocalisations that resist the neat shape of speech. The keening is not a code to be cracked. It is the body's own language, older than any alphabet, and it speaks directly to the body's own grief.

A sculpture of an open mouth in mourning can honour this without imitation. The cast bronze can carry the curve of a sound that never quite became a syllable. A video can hold the long moment after a wail has ended, when the face is still working to recover itself. The artist is not required to reproduce the sound; the form can carry its memory. This is one of the quieter privileges of sculpture: it can hold absence in solid matter.

In a country where the formal grieving practices of the oldest continuous cultures on earth have often been dismissed or misread, this kind of attention carries a particular weight. The National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales have, in recent years, foregrounded works that treat mourning as a continuing practice rather than a historical one. The open mouth, in these contexts, becomes a meeting point. It is a place where the unsayable is not a failure of language but its most honest form.

Witnessing: speaking from the wound

There is a tradition in contemporary art, particularly in feminist and postcolonial practice, in which the maker does not speak about an experience but speaks from it. The mouth that opens in the work is not offering testimony as evidence, in the legal sense, but as a kind of bearing witness. The wound is the location of the speech. The scar is where the voice gathers. This is a different relationship to language than reporting or explaining. It assumes that the listener is willing to receive a fragment rather than a story, and to do some of the work themselves.

Australian artists have approached this condition with a particular blend of directness and reserve. Watching a Tracey Moffatt film, or a work by a younger maker coming out of the Queensland College of Art or the Sydney College of the Arts, one can sense an inherited caution: a refusal to perform suffering, paired with a refusal to look away. The open mouth, in this lineage, is neither confessional nor stoic. It is alert. It is the mouth of someone who has learned the cost of speaking and has decided, this time, to pay it.

The studio becomes a place where this decision is rehearsed. A plaster cast is taken, the lips parted by hand. The video is edited until the moment of the utterance is exactly where it needs to be. The sound is mixed so that the breath before the word is louder than the word itself. These are quiet decisions, and they determine whether the work earns the right to open its mouth at all.

Country, silence and the Australian voice

There is a kind of silence that belongs to this continent. It is not the silence of absence but the silence of scale. Stand in the Pilbara at dusk, or on the salt flats of Lake Eyre, or in the wet season stillness of the Top End, and the ear recalibrates. The mouth, by comparison, seems almost excessive. Words feel small. The voice, however sincere, has to earn its place against a horizon that has been speaking, in its own way, for a very long time.

To make work about the open mouth in this context is to negotiate with that scale. It is also to negotiate with the long history of whose voice has been heard on this land. The revival of palawa kani, the reconstructed language of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, is one example of what it means to reclaim a voice that was formally declared extinct. The work of keeping that language alive is slow, technical, and intensely practical. It is also, in a sense, the work of opening a mouth that was closed by policy. Similar efforts are underway in many parts of the country, in language centres from Broome to Cairns to western Sydney.

The studio practice that takes the open mouth as a subject does not need to mirror these efforts. It can, however, learn from their patience. A voice that is being recovered cannot be rushed. It has to be shaped, again and again, until it begins to feel like it belongs to the person speaking it. The same patience is required in the studio, where a cast has to be remade, a sound has to be rerecorded, an image has to be held until it releases what it contains.

Material language: what sculpture can hold

Sculpture is a slow medium. It does not speak in the way a sentence does. It speaks in the way a held breath does, in the way a stone sits in a hand. When the subject is the open mouth, the material has to take on something of the mouth's qualities. Plaster catches the soft. Bronze holds the open. Wax keeps the warmth. Video preserves the breath. Each material has its own accent, and the work has to find the right one.

A piece in painted steel cannot sound the same as a piece in unfired clay. The first will tend toward the declarative, the second toward the vulnerable. The decision matters. In Australian studio programmes, particularly those connected with the Australian National University in Canberra or the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, there is an ongoing conversation about the way material carries meaning. The open mouth is not a neutral form; it will be read through whatever it is made of. Choosing the material honestly is a kind of ethics.

This is also why documentation matters. A sculpture of a mouth can travel. It can be exhibited in Perth, in Hobart, in Brisbane. It can be photographed, filmed, and described. Each of those translations risks flattening what the material was carrying. The studio practice, in the long run, has to consider not only how the work is made but how it continues to speak once it has left the room it was made in.

Notes for approaching the open mouth

Working with this subject rewards a particular kind of attention. A few considerations gathered from recent practice:

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