Marc Quinn last amazed the public by placing a giant pregnant disabled woman on the Fourth Plinth of Trafalgar Square.
Now he is looking at pregnancy from the inside with nine large sculptures depicting the development of a foetus from 22 days to just before birth.
They have been carved in a pink marble whose mottling conveys the fine veins below the growing child’s skin. They go on display at the White Cube Mason’s Yard gallery, St James’s, tomorrow in Quinn’s first exhibition in the capital since 2005.
Quinn was inspired partly by Slaves, sculptures by the Renaissance master Michelangelo, in which bodies almost fight their way out of rough-hewn rock.
But the five-ton sculptures, made of marble quarried from the Spanish-Portuguese border, were also prompted by witnessing the way viewers reacted with repulsion to Alison Lapper, the Trafalgar Square model, and to his series of figurative sculptures depicting people missing arms and legs.
Yet everyone had once been a foetus just like these curious-looking embryos, he said, as he put the finishing touches to the show.
“This one looks like an alien in films. Some are distinctively extraterrestrial. But it’s universal because every single person has come from this.” He said the pieces flagged up ” our relationship to our body and what is normal, beautiful or different”.
There is an audio interview and a visit to the exhibition here, in the latest episode of the BBC4’s “Front Row” weekly wrapup podcast – it’s the second segment. Quinn energetically disavows any political motivations, reiterating what he says in the newspaper piece above, about his interest in life, particularly how life develops.
The piece at Trafalger Square was also intriguing and controversial to some – a giganatic statue of pregnant fellow-artist Alison Lapper, born with a condition called phocomelia which left her with no arms and underdeveloped legs. a statue called, well, “Alison Lapper Pregnant.”
They are gorgeous.
When I think about it, fetuses (feti? all of us at one point?) are really extraterrestrial in the strict sense that we have not yet touched the earth.
True art keeps finding itself on the side of Truth and Beauty.
Hmmm… I saw the quote by Olsen in his article “The Death of Blogs.” He used you as an example of someone who’d left the blogosphere. But you seem to be here, as active as ever. Did I miss something? I did read your explanatory post.
Anyhow, I’m speaking at Mount Hermon and was going to use you as an example of someone who’d made her exit. But, well, I’m glad I didn’t. It does raise a good question about what Olsen really meant by quoting you. (Or maybe he missed something too?)
I think it’s interesting that he had to energetically disavow any political motivations. I’ve been thinking about this a lot (I just wrote a post about my conversion from being pro-choice to pro-life if you’re interested), and it’s interesting how something as simple as accurately showing people what a fetus is can put you on the defensive about having “political motivations.”