C / TAIL

Slade School of Fine Art MFA Degree Show 2018

C was my degree show installation at the Slade School of Fine Art. It consisted of a room painted dark blue, the centre of which was a 4 metre long silicone cast from the tail of Waterhouse Hawkins’ concrete Hylaeosaur from 1854 in Crystal Palace Park. This was fed by a bathroom pump on a timer to breathe in and out at regular intervals. Surrounding this was a projection of my video work Loop, made from rotating hologram glitter in jelly, forming a strange planet consuming itself. On screens were Still Lyes, made with Lye, Verdigris pigment and jelly, showing the full life cycle of a form appearing through a tube into empty space. The sound was composed of overlaid hydrophone recordings from the Tingvoll fjord, Norway: a mix of biological activity, liquid resonance and deep sea drone.

I look at how ideas and objects transform over time. A key example of this is the dinosaur tail silicone skin, which ‘breathes’ to expand and contract every half hour.

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The separation from the sea, the membrane, creates an inside and an outside. Life first arising in the water created a division between (Me)-(me-you)-(you).

Italo Calvino describes this separation in Blood, Sea: “What do you mean, the outside doesn’t matter much? What I mean is that if you look at it more closely, from the point of view of the old outside, that is from the present inside, what is the present outside? It’s simply where it’s dry, where there is no flux or reflux, as far as mattering goes… The skin is the border between form and substance.