Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.A young naked man sits on a jet engine, which resembles a torso with entrails of twisted tubes and pipes like thighs protruding from its groin. It's a composition of contrasts: a fragile youth with a defunct war machine.
The piece forms part of a series, Untitled, by artist Roger Hiorns, to go on show at the Calder – the Hepworth Wakefield's new contemporary art space. A group of naked young men will each sit on a selection of objects: a stainless-steel preparation table, a bench smeared with calf brain, giant slices of concrete, flat-screen televisions, containers filled with the dust of a pulverised altarpiece, a concrete bench from Camden Council. Some objects – benches, the table – have a flame burning at one end. The arrangements seem impossible to make sense of. The artist refers to his work as propositions, a deliberately open-ended term.
Hiorns is probably best known for Seizure, the interior of a condemned apartment in Elephant and Castle, which he crystallised with copper sulphate, now at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Damien Hirst selected two copper-sulphate-dipped engines by Hiorns (which Hirst owns), as his luxury on Desert Island Discs earlier this year. Hiorns works very differently to the YBA generation: more intellectual, without antics or showmanship.
The artist avoids making work, which could become as recognisable as a brand. Crystallised engines displayed alongside polystyrene sculptures splattered with calf brain, a machine which drops vandalised coins to the floor, a pile of dust in one corner, and a mound of blue contact lenses in another.
“I don't want to get trapped in my own work. I'm not trying to satisfy a general audience. Embracing inconsistency means you're not just living by a sense of who you are aesthetically, or believing too heavily,” he says. “I want there to be more questions than answers. I don't want to be too easily liked.”
Hiorns blends brains in his studio, using a food processor and brains bought from the butcher. One woman was so horrified when she realised what she was looking at – it wasn't obvious until you read the label – that she spun on her heel and walked out.
A planned project is to bury a passenger aeroplane underground in the Welsh hills. A shaft will lead from the earth's surface down into the fuselage below. It's ambitious, on a scale with Seizure, and somewhat bonkers.
But, he explains: “It's important to try to subvert and direct the pathway of technology somehow.”
Roger Hiorns: Untitled is at the Hepworth Wakefield (hepworthwakefield.org) to 3 November
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments