Beast

This I started a few years ago as a large composite made from all sorts of found objects, including a lot of bones and mechanical parts, as my own rendition of Beast (as in Beauty and the Beast) with many layers of meaning and autobiographical references. It’s a slow-burning work in progress, though there are one or two interesting things I have done on it. The heart is made from a dried rose head in a ball of resin, pierced by approximately sixty hypodermic needles which were a waste product of my oocyte storage, and caged in three aluminium ‘atomic’ rings. The sculpture is envisage to eventually become an elaborate composition that may remind people of Kris Kuksi, H. I. Giger, and perhaps Shaun Tan.

In the base is a working centrifugal fan (as I got it from a skip and I know a slightly mad person who decided he’d wire it up to work because it would be amusing; consequently he turns up and says without fail “can I turn the fan on?” so it blows everything off the table) – I may use it to channel air around the sculpture to ‘move’ parts and create musical/audible notes.

I really like bones and skeletal structures, and I’m one of those people who actually appreciates people/cats bringing me dead things. Things die all the time, so it’s quite a useful gift preference to have.