PRESS RELEASE
11 March 2013
The Nature of the Beast
26 April – 30 June 2012
3rd floor galleries
The New Art Gallery Walsall
Preview – Thursday 25 April, 6-8pm
Mat Collishaw, Mark Fairnington, Tessa Farmer, Polly Morgan, Olly & Suzi, Patricia
Piccinini
This exhibition will bring together a diverse range of contemporary artists, who
through their work, confront and challenge our complex relationships with the
natural world, and in particular, the animal kingdom.
We eat animals, we use their skins as clothing, we take nourishment from their milk
and eggs, we employ them for sport, we keep them as pets. Humankind has long
been fascinated by animals, who in turn, have been subjected to research,
collection, categorisation, documentation, display and experimentation. Each of the
artists within the exhibition creates works which involve an intensive scrutiny of
animals and nature as well as a critical engagement with the ways in which we
have attempted to understand and control the natural world.
The exhibition seeks to evoke a sense of wonder and critical enquiry. Although
moments of humour are present, the overall mood is intended to be dark and
thought-provoking.
Tessa Farmer captures the beauty, complexity and cruelty of nature in her
sculptures, drawings, films and installations. Her materials are drawn from the
natural world and include animal and insect carcasses, plant roots and other found
natural materials. Her artistic language is derived from sources such as the fantasy
and darkness of fairy tales and the traditional tableaux of stuffed creatures found in
museums. Farmer’s creations are frequently populated by demonic fairies,
constructed from twigs and insect wings, mercilessly executing acts of mischief and
torture on their victims. Her works are sinister yet playful as she delights in the
detail, the violence and the humour of her theatrical installations. Farmer will be
creating one of largest installations she has yet attempted for The Nature of the
Beast. Amongst the key protagonists within her epic installation will be a cobra,
crabs and bees.
Polly Morgan is a trained taxidermist, a skill she acquired due to her love of animals
and her desire to preserve them. Whilst her earlier works were intimate, surreal
and poetic, her most recent works have become more ambitious in scale,
complexity and content. She boldly confronts the viewer with the uncompromising
cycle of life and the constant exchange of one life for another and seeks to disrupt
and challenge our preconceptions of animal life. Harbour (2012) presents the
viewer with a dead fox with an octopus apparently squeezing the life out of it, its
tentacles winding around and through the fox’s lifeless carcass. Tiny birds hover
overhead, apparently seeking nourishment from the tentacles of the octopus. In
Hide and Fight (2012), the belly of a dead stag provides sanctuary for nesting bats.
A brand new work, commissioned especially for the exhibition, will see a swarm of
lovebirds descending upon a human heart like vultures. Lovebirds are regarded as
sweet and beguiling, they are often kept in pairs and they fuel our appetite for
sentiment. In reality, they can be aggressive birds that have been known to peck
their partners to death. Like Tessa Farmer, Morgan has been influenced by the
taxidermy found in museums, particularly those constructed into elaborate
tableaux. However, the benign nature of these displays has given way to still
surreal yet more brutal representations.
Mat Collishaw is an artist who works across a wide range of media. He has never
been afraid to confront difficult or challenging subject matter, yet the works he
creates are often stunningly beautiful. Insecticides is a photographic series which
was begun in 2006 and is still ongoing. Butterflies are caught between two glass
slides and then scanned at high resolution before being subject to further digital
manipulation. These creatures are literally captured at the moment of death. Their
twisted and distorted forms still appear seductive and compelling as we marvel at
the detail, the colour and the texture. However, we are also aware of the brutal act
that has contained these creatures for our consumption. The images hover
between life and death, combining the familiar with the shocking and the alluring
with the repulsive. We are reminded of the popular Victorian pursuit of capturing,
collecting and classifying butterflies. The insects were pinned through their torsos
to a display board, so that they could be studied and admired. Collishaw’s process
apes scientific study where organisms are placed between glass plates to enable
them to be studied through a microscope.
Artist Mark Fairnington frequently challenges our conceptions of the natural world
within his majestic paintings. For this exhibition, he will be showing a series of six
life-sized paintings of prize-winning bulls, each with its given name such as Turbo
Tommy or Doncombe Aga Khan. This will be the first time all six bull paintings have
been shown together. The bulls are painted against a bright white ground, giving
them an abstract quality and also presenting them as if they are specimens for
observation, documentation and comparison. There are also references to both
religious icons and to colour field painting, which seem to bestow a sense of dignity
to the animal. Both their scale and the attention to detail evoke a sense of wonder
and magnificence. The artist takes hundreds of photographs across the surface of
the bulls and uses these to build an impression of the texture and physicality of the
animal. Whilst at a distance, the paintings appear strongly naturalistic, as we
approach them, the illusionism slips away to reveal a hauntingly beautiful painterly
surface. It reveals itself as a construct of a range of fictions, not least man’s
interventions regarding the breeding of these animals. Man has consistently
attempted to control and challenge nature. We live in an age of genetically
modified foods and where the breeding of animals is bound up with market forces
and twisted notions of aesthetics.
Australian artist Patricia Piccinini creates extraordinary sculptures, installations,
drawings and photographs which explore the increasingly blurred boundaries
between nature and technology. Piccinini transports us to a not so distant future
age where genetic experimentation and scientific developments have resulted in
the creation of other-worldly hybrid creatures. Her sculpted creatures appear
scarily convincing, created as they are from fibreglass, silicone, human hair and
clothing. Whilst these beings are certainly arresting, Piccinini does not represent
them as freaks or monsters. There is a warmth inherent within her work and the
creatures often appear fragile and vulnerable. She often presents scenarios where
fictional creatures interact with seemingly human beings, nestling intimately against
them. The Carrier (2012) presents an ape- or bear-like creature supporting an
elderly woman. Their relationship is intentionally ambiguous. Is it one of mutual
trust or is the creature enslaved? Sphinx (2012) is a creature apparently created
for procreation, its sphinx-like form combining references to both male and female
genitalia. Ghost (2012) is suspended from the ceiling, his luscious hair hanging
proudly and his tyre-like hat reminding us at once of an ape at play or more
disturbingly, an animal suspended within an abattoir. Piccinini reminds us not only
of what the future might hold but of our responsibility to all living creatures.
The paintings and drawings of partnership Olly & Suzi are frequently created in the
natural environment of the animals they observe. The pair embark on field trips to
research animals at first hand. Their subjects could be dangerous, they may move
swiftly or be threatened by human presence. They may live in inhospitable
environments. Olly & Suzi’s practice involves careful and considered research,
meticulous planning and sheer courage and curiosity. To create their works, the
artists often need to act quickly, to work together in perfect harmony, sometimes
executing a painting or drawing in a matter of seconds. Direct evidence of the
animal’s presence is sometimes demonstrated through bite marks or footprints.
Olly & Suzi embody the spirit of the intrepid explorer, their compelling works
evoking a powerful sense of the experience of being close to an animal in its
natural habitat and re-affirming our own, often humbling relationship to nature. For
The Nature of the Beast, the pair will be showing an installation of drawings and
paintings of Wild Dogs, produced in Tanzania over a four year period of research.
Like many of their subjects, these wild dogs are in danger of extinction and the
artists, through their practice, seek to share their fascination with these creatures
and to raise awareness of their plight.
Olly & Suzi also engage in studio practice. In some of their most recent work, they
have focused on insects such as cockroaches, dung beetles and ants. A large
painting of cockroaches celebrates the wide variety of species of such a creature.
Individual cockroaches are painted initially from careful study, only to give way
gradually to flights of fantasy and imagination.
The exhibition as a whole might be seen as the embodiment of a kind of
contemporary Wunderkammer – a cabinet of curiosities where we can marvel at
the compelling and dynamic creations of these artists and of the wonders of nature.
However, the dark side of the exhibition encourages a deeper interrogation of
man’s relationship with nature and the ongoing impulse to contain and control the
natural cycle.
Our Creatures
As part of the project, artist Mark Fairnington is curating an historic exhibition
entitled Our Creatures. This exhibition explores portraits of animals and offers
glimpses into the ways in which artworks have described different relationships
between human beings and animals. These are images and objects that depict in
particular the domestic and local relationships between people and animals and
show how these could be pragmatic, eccentric, brutal and loving.
Here are the creatures that have provided friendship, entertainment and sport;
they could be made to fight, they could be raced against each other, they could be
bred and sold for profit and they could be eaten as food. In these roles they
inspired a huge range of human responses: they were and still are a vital part of
the human world both emotionally and economically.
This exhibition will include works from Walsall’s collections in addition to loans
from Manchester City Art Gallery, Leeds Museums & Galleries, Compton Verney,
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Ikon Gallery and the Horniman Museum.
A range of events will be organised to accompany the exhibition.
A publication will accompany the exhibition though this will be published slightly
later than the opening of the exhibition to allow for photography of the new works.
ENDS
NOTES TO EDITORS
For gallery interview opportunities and further information, please contact:
Chris Wilkinson, Marketing Officer on 01922 654416;
email: wilkinsonc@walsall.gov.uk
The New Art Gallery Walsall is run and maintained by Walsall Council and also
receives significant financial support from Arts Council England.
Open Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 5pm, Sundays 12noon – 4pm. Closed
Mondays, and Bank Holidays. Free admission.
For more information visit: thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk