Steel pliers, ceramic head, magnet. 15x15x1cm August 2024
An anthropomorphic sculpture composed of a pair of pliers to which a ceramic head has been attached.
I made the head about thirty years ago in around 1994.
I call the piece Homo Habilis after the extinct species of human that lived in Eastern and Southern Africa about two million years ago. Homo Habilis literally means Handy Man, which in my piece nicely links to the handyman’s tool, the pliers. Homo Habilis is also referred to as ‘Man the Toolmaker’, which links equally nicely with the piece.
The sphere that’s resting on top of the bottle is an old tennis ball that has lost all of its coating and that seems to have been left outside in the elements for a very long time. I think I found it in the garden, probably lost there by the previous owner of the property. Because of its colour, patina and texture it looks a lot more substantial than it actually is.
The shape of the bottle and the fact that the glass isn’t of uniform thickness suggests a vintage vessel, but it is actually a contemporary supermarket salad dressing bottle that was still being used for its original purpose the day before it was requisitioned for this sculpture. The salad dressing company were probably trying to tap into the current demand for artisan foodstuffs and consumer goods.
The found objects in this sculpture are unmodified and there is minimal physical input or compositional decisions that need making in the creation the work (The ball has to be place on top of the bottle, pure and simple). This probably makes the piece a form of readymade.
A mole wrench and an oil can cap create an anthropomorphic sculpture suggesting an embracing couple.
The sculpture came about when I was about to put teak oil on my kitchen worktop, which was something I’d been putting off for the previous five years. The cap of the tin of teak oil was rusted in place due to lack of use and I had to take it off using a mole wrench. Holding the resulting wrench and cap combination instantly I sensed the potential for it to be a work of art in some way, partly because the oil can’s cap resembled an eye when the light struck it. At first I thought that the assemblage perhaps resembled a fish, but after a bit of turning it round in my hands I saw human forms emerge.
This is a good example of the way that people can interpret objects differently to the nature of the objects themselves. I believe that our brains interpret things based on a hierarchy of significance. The brain sees something and then scans down a list of likely possibilities for what the thing is, with highly significant things at the top of the list. At the very top of the list is ‘human being’. Very much lower down the list, if it’s on the list a all, is ‘mole wrench’. When you see a mole wrench in a tool box you automatically go straight to the ‘mole wrench’ item way down your brain’s list, because the context in which you see the wrench is strongly suggestive that it is indeed a mole wrench that you’re looking at. However, in the context-free setting of the photo above your brain has to work harder and has to consult its built-in list of possibilities, at the top of which is ‘human being’. The wrench possesses something of the shape of a human form, and thus the connection is made. The fact that the wrench is standing in a way that no mole wrench in the real world could do without support helps to amplify the effect.
An assemblage composed of a kitchen sieve placed in front of an old framed mirror. The reflection of the mesh of the sieve in the mirror creates interesting Moiré fringes as it interacts with the actual mesh.
When a person looks at their reflection in the mirror through the mesh of the sieve the observer experiences a degree of psychological distancing from their reflected self, almost as though the reflected person is in a strange cage.
A surreal or dada found object sculpture made from a cobbler’s shoe last with a cigarette inserted into the circular hole in the last that is designed to accommodate a handle. The last is mounted on a lamp stand.
The sculpture utilises the human sensory condition known as pareidolia, the interpretation of shapes as human faces, to create a surreal head. Pareidolia is essential for the interpretation of a lot of art, especially art in which faces are merely suggested by, say, a few strokes of a paintbrush. In some art pareidolia is actually a curse though – think of the number of abstract images that are ruined when you see an unintentional face in them. The sculpture’s title, Last Cigarette, utilises the human tendency to reinterpret words to create puns – in this case the word ‘last’ referring to the wooden cobbler’s last, meaning that the cigarette is the last’s last cigarette.
