From so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful

The title of this exhibition, “From So Simple a Beginning, Endless Forms Most Beautiful” is a quote from Charles Darwin that I think poetically captures the amazingly, vital creativity of the organic. In this show I have in some ways allowed the natural evolution of my practice to spin out of control. I have followed the conceptual and formal threads in multiple directions, with new sculpture, painting and video works that explore different aspects of evolution, connection and beauty.

Beauty in nature, like the flamboyant tail of the peacock, was something that confounded Darwin because it seemed to contradict the efficient materiality of evolution. However, wherever we look in nature we see a beauty that resonates with us deeply. This is why I have returned to the Fairy Wren several times in the exhibition. The male fairy wren turns blue during mating season to attract a mate, so losing the safe camouflage of their normal brown feathers. This eye-catching display does not make them better able to survive, in fact quite the opposite, they become more vulnerable, however this blue beauty is what their mates select for. I am so interested in the way that this love for a beautiful bright colour connects us, humans, with other creatures around us, like the fairy wrens.

Another key element of the exhibition is hair, both as an idea and as a material. I’m very excited about these new kinetic hair sculptures that I’ve been working on. They are derived from a commission that I made for my exhibition at Tai Kwun in Hong Kong, an expanded into works like Sensuous Gyre Cascade.

Hair has always been a huge part of my practice. There is flowing hair and body hair and wild unruly hair. There is elaborately styled hair. There is hair that forms into something else. There is stuff that just looks like hair but isn’t. For me, hair is a great iconography because it is so amorphous and can be so many things at once.

It is ambiguous but emotive and beautiful. Hair is living but it is not alive. It is sensuous but it has no feelings. Hair is never fixed, we can transform our hair into whatever we choose but at the same time it will always try to return to a tangle. What we do to our hair expresses both our interiority and our relationship to social pressures. Hair is one of these things that is used to divide us but it is also what unites us with all other mammals. “Strand” is a work that I made almost entirely of hair, but hair that is animated and given a life of its own. Its is a celebration of the beauty and strangeness of hair.

There is also this figurative work, which is like a bas-relief, where I’m almost painting with hair, using punched hair to create objects. I feel that it’s a genuinely unique way of working with both hair and silicone.

Something I am trying to do with this show is draw out and foreground the relationship between my practice and surrealism, which is quite foundational for me. There are a new series of silicone sculptures that push the use of that medium beyond it’s traditional application in hyperrealistic sculpture. These new works are more stylised or abstracted. They allow me to play with the plastic possibilities of silicone as a material, whilst also exploring colour in a more dynamic and exciting way.

The spirit of Surrealism is very obvious in a new suite of paintings, that act as the show’s true heart: both its centre and its generator of life.

The paintings are made from webs of histories and imaginings and are the most intimate pieces of the exhibition. Their pale colours are soothing and hint at a world where chimeric forms emerge like new growth in spring. They are a joy and a wonder rather than a threat to purity.

These spaces are where I like to dwell; where a shoe with a wisteria placenta can incubate a human foetus along with its already habituated life companion, a cat. Where two conjoined sneakers become a tree whose soles are the perfect nesting place for fairy wrens to lay their eggs.

To me the idea of a blended creature is intrinsically sensual. It implies a coming together of forms or individuals in a seamless, borderless way. To be able to feel what others feel in an embodied way is a dream but also what drives art or even evolution.

The Cleaner is a figure which recurs through the exhibition, in sculpture and drawing and in a new video work. She is an aging, anthropomorphic turtle with a shiny, artificial shell and she talks about what it means to live in a world that is increasingly overrun by plastic waste. In the video we get a chance to enter this creature’s internal world. I tried to imagine how a leatherback turtle could make sense of ocean plastic. They have no way to understand that pollution is the thoughtless discharge of the human species, so how would they see it?

Perhaps it might be ghost food? We know that ocean plastic smells like food to turtles because it’s covered in algae. So, at first the copious amounts of floating plastic might make them feel excited by its sheer abundance, but ultimately their bodies end up uncomfortably full but drained of energy. The Cleaner is a figure who invites us to think about this issue, and what we might do to help.

The other video in the exhibition, Baleen Choreography, also explores the ocean as a space which is both part of the world but also incredibly alien. In the work we we see a humpback whale singing to his peers. We humans really want to know what these whales are saying but I’m often personally unsure about whether we really need to know. Maybe we can just bask in the vibrations that they emit and leave it at that.

In Baleen Choreography, we hear the wondrous sounds of a humpback whale and we notice that the small swimming creatures around him change and move in response to his songs but we don’t know why. It’s a mystery. A lovely, beautiful enigma.

Sitting serenely in the midst of the vibrant complexity of the exhibition is Kindred. In this work we see three unique individuals each set at a different point on a continuum of greater or lesser ‘animalness’. The work is inspired by one of our closest primate relations, the orangutan. Each of the three figures is a hybrid, but all are both unique and connected. The mother is closest to the primate inspiration, and you might even imagine that she is a rendering of a true orangutang, but her features are actually much closer to ours. Her two children each look increasingly human, both somewhere between her and us. However, the point is not their differences but their connection. They all share the same hair and eyes, but more than that they share an obvious bond, and they all look in the same direction: outwards, to us and to the future.

The idea that humans are uniquely and fundamentally different from other animals is a cornerstone of how we have traditionally seen ourselves. It is this specialness that allows us to exploit the environment and other beings around us, so completely. However, both genetic analysis and observation is now showing how small that difference is. We see common DNA everywhere, and common behaviours in many other animals, especially primates. Like us, orangutan mothers keep their children close and educate them for many years. For me, Kindred is not about anthropomorphising orangutans. It is about acknowledging our common animalness. It is all about connections.