conor doyle
oh thomas!
what'd you wish for?
This passage is taken from Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us by Jesse Bering describes the moral panic that enveloped the society of 17th Century New England…
“You have heard of the witch hunts in Salem, but I am guessing you’re not as familiar with the PigMan hunts of New Haven. Men secretly in league with the devil to impregnate barnyard animals… the fear was that resulting malevolent offspring called Prodigies (my how the meaning of that word has changed over time) would silently infiltrate the fledgling America and muck it all up with evil for the god-fearing folk.
The settlers had got this strange idea from the teachings of the violently prudish medieval scholar Thomas Aquinas who coined the term prodigy to refer to any hybrid creature sprung from the loins of another species but born of human seed”
With the advent of CRISPR gene editing, we’re now on the cusp of creating human-animal hybrids that we can harvest for parts. And as such Thomas Aquinas’s medieval fear-mongering is being realised today. Oh Thomas! what’d you wish for?
the build
Created: Dec'21 - Feb '22
Dimensions:
Height 180cm
Width: 165cm
Depth: 80cm
Material: Treated & Damaged Flannel, Cardboard and Wadding
In terms of construction...
I adopt a 3-layer “human” process
(skeleton / musculoskeletan / skin)
At the core sits a 3d patterned cardboard skeleton structure...
I then layer a wadding/stuffing musculoskeletan ...
and finally the works skin is made from a treated flannel, using a heavy over-exposed stitching technique.
Like skin, fabric wears and damages in your hand, ageing naturally as you work on it.
wonky
detail
Using/or damaging materials, adding elements of irregularity and imperfection to distress the work creates a sense of agitation around something that looks fun and innocent at first glance…
questioning both our understanding of the work and secondly our trained everyday assumptions.
