‘Yay, to have a mouth!’ Has an Oral Fixation

An ex of mine once jibed that, when I open my mouth, words just fall out, in no particular order. As if that’s a bad thing. Their comment came back to me when I visited ‘Yay, to have a mouth!’, a show concocted by gallerists Rose Easton and Freddie Powell, of Ginny on Frederick, to celebrate Easton’s new London space. The exhibition assembles a motley collection of paintings and sculptures by 13 artists, celebrating the seductive, incongruous and associative capacities of mouths.

In a striking pairing of works made 25 years apart by artists with ostensibly unrelated concerns, Maggi Hambling’s painting Prelude (2000) hangs across from R.I.P. Germain’s sculpture What Does a Hat, a Trophy and a Fishbowl Have In Common? (2025). Made up of six diptychs, each comprised of a mouth breaking into a smeary, satisfied smile and a vulva crowned with black pubic hair, Hambling’s work melds reds and browns to depict these bodily orifices engorged with blood. In Germain’s sculpture, installed on a square of acoustic foam, a figure crouches in a side squat, clutching a decommissioned Glock pistol in one hand while the other proffers a stack of custom caps embroidered with the words, ‘When you see me, don’t blink or stare.’ In the gun’s carrycase, displayed in front of the figure, lies a strange object, at odds with the pristine condition of the rest of the sculpture: a loaf of black pudding, already mouldering at the show’s opening. A small card printed with a quote from the late Chicago rapper Bloodhound Lil Jeff is pinned to the block of congealed blood sausage with a single bullet. Surprisingly, perhaps, in a show about mouths, all of the works here are silent. The oral is diverted into written text, visual representation and more or less obvious forms of suggestion. In Germain’s work, a quotation recorded as text issues not from the figure’s physical mouth, which is concealed behind a black balaclava and a silicone monster mask, but seemingly from the mind instead which, when juxtaposed with the cake of blood, speaks resoundingly of rage, grief and lives devoured by systems of violence, desire and consumption.

Quotation – and blood – also feature in I.W. Payne’s News travels fast! I.W. Payne went on a date with Loie Fuller and Mina Loy (2025), a life-size MDF cut-out of modern dance pioneer Fuller’s dancing silhouette, painted with a red-and-white polka-dot pattern and overlaid with a large photograph of Payne’s mouth. A speech bubble cites from Loy’s 1915 poem, ‘Love Songs’, ‘We might have given birth to a butterfly / With the daily-news / Printed in blood on its wings’. The bill for the copious number of drinks the three women consumed on their imaginary date unfurls down the back of the sculpture. The mouth here is an organ for inebriation and artistry – and maybe kissing, too.

The sculpture injects a joyous energy into the show, which ripples out to touch other works and morph into absurdity, incongruity or obscurity. In Barbara Wesołowska’s Overlooked (2024), a roiling mass of brown oil paint and shellac slowly resolves itself into a face whose generous mouth never quite attains clear definition –  much like the exhibition, which generates a vast field of reference to one of the most versatile organs of the human body. Marrying disparate aesthetic styles and forging non-linear conceptual connections, it leaps across categories and indulges in free association, putting things in no particular order. And that’s a good thing.

‘Yay, to have a mouth!’, organised with Ginny on Frederick, is on view at Rose Easton, London, until 29 March

^{Main image: Phillip Gabriel, The Decraniated; or, The Modern Frankenstein (detail), 2024, oil on linen, 61 × 51 cm. Courtesy: the artist, Rose Easton, London, and Ginny on Frederick, London; photograph: Jack Elliot Edwards}