When Forms Come Alive: Living and Growing Art at Hayward Gallery
We travel to London's South Bank for Hayward Gallery's latest immersive exhibition...
By
Rhea Mathur
February 22, 2024
One of the most poignant works in When Forms Come Alive at the Hayward Gallery is Olaf Brzeski’s Dream-Spontaneous Combustion (2008). Crafted from materials such as plywood, soot, and black pigment, Brzeski’s cloud of smoke hangs in the air as though patiently waiting for the impact of the destruction it has just wrought, the wall coated with black pigment in strokes that evoke a palpable sense of fear. With images of war, destruction, and trauma constantly accessible on our phones from the moment we wake up, Brzeski’s sculpture embodies the collective experience of trauma that we all share in our own ways. Inspired by the notion that “fire is nothing other than matter changing its form,” Brzeski employs polyurethane resin and carbon fibre matting to free himself from the darkness that surrounded him while growing up in a war-torn Wrocław in 1975.
Open until 6th May 2024, this exhibition at the Southbank Centre explores the potential that sculptural art holds in transforming our spaces, redefining artistic boundaries, and questioning form. It allows its artists space to grow, expand, contract, move, and illuminate without any visible limitations. As a result, the twenty-one international artists create a playful, bizarre, and extremely Instagram-friendly exhibition using an array of materials, allowing the audience to enjoy the whimsy in contemporary art. It also, however, employs this play with form to capture the impact that social conditions and our histories have on organic and physical bodies. The sculptures in this exhibition are a material manifestation of not just the impact of our emotions on our living, breathing bodies, but also our continuous and complex conversation with the natural world as we live through war, extreme industrialisation and environmental degradation.
Next to the main entrance of the exhibition is the HENI project space which houses Eva Fàbregas’s Pumping (2019), made from mixed materials including sensory balls, latex and silicone tubing. The result is a room bursting with large, interconnected tubes that occupy every inch of space and require the audience to walk around to the corner of the room, avoiding any tentacles. With twelve subwoofers installed within this complex and entangled system, the night-club music can not only be heard but felt by the audience. Coupled with the changing lights, creating constantly moving shadows, Fàbregas’s work almost feels alive and growing.
Attached to the ceiling with thin, visible wires that mimic intravenous lines given at a hospital, Pumping feels like a depiction of organic matter being assisted in its growth by the gallery. The small text guide placed at the entrance assists the audience in understanding the materials and ideas behind the work, but it avoids fixing any meaning onto the piece. This allows When Forms Come Alive to become an exhibition that helps the audience develop their ideas of what the work symbolises and take part in the creative process. Channelling the creativity of a diverse audience ultimately appears to be one of the main goals of this exhibition. Additionally, Pumping successfully enables us to think about the organic and physical body that is constantly growing and altering itself with its surroundings. While the room hosts this artwork, it is also what restricts its growth acting both as its host and its limiter.
Similarly in Marguerite Humeau’s The Holder of Wasp Vemon (2023) and The Guardian of Ancient Yeast (2023), the artist uses materials such as natural beeswax, microcrystalline wax, pigments, 150-year-old walnut (cause of death: unknown), handblown glass and wasp venom. Humeau uses organic materials and pairs them with man-made materials, to compare and contrast our interconnectedness with the natural world. On entering this room, an employee of the gallery gives the audience a piece of beeswax to feel the material from which a majority of the work is sculpted. This helps the audience further understand the complexity of creating these shapes and dimensions, but also our constant contact and communication with living bodies in the world especially on how they learn, adapt, grow and survive. At the same time, while using forms that are capable of outliving mankind, she focuses on the forms in nature that can outlive us and in some ways are our limiters.
When Forms Come Alivehas been criticised by some as an exhibition focusing on aesthetics and using the question of form to create art that does not engage with key notions of art history. However, if we look closely at the work in the exhibition, while being playful and full of odd shapes and moving bodies, it accurately does what it claims to do; it examines a movement within sculpture, incorporating Michel Blazy’s Bouquet Final (2012) - made from bath foam, water and scaffolding - resulting in a gigantic sculpture that includes falling and bending foam which miraculously holds its shape. It also includes Holly Hendry’s Sottobosco (2024), which is made from steel ducting, stainless steel, blown glass, concrete canvas, paint and other such materials to evoke the appearance of lichen, a fungus-algae and the oldest life form on Earth, in our buildings and architecture. The contrast of this organic, ancient life form surviving on a brutalist structure like the Southbank Centre, focuses again on the interconnectedness between humans and the organic world we may overlook daily.
The twenty-one artists in this exhibition come together to highlight, at a crucial stage of the climate crisis and ecological disasters, the inescapability of mankind from its living, growing and organic surroundings. It reminds us that while these fungi will survive our race, they currently co-habit our structures, reacting to the ever-growing human race. When Forms Come Alive allows artwork to escape frames and boundaries and highlights our ongoing conversation with nature, reminding its audience of our impact on our planet and its constant impact on us.
When Forms Come Alive is showing at Hayward Gallery until 6th May 2024.
One of the most poignant works in When Forms Come Alive at the Hayward Gallery is Olaf Brzeski’s Dream-Spontaneous Combustion (2008). Crafted from materials such as plywood, soot, and black pigment, Brzeski’s cloud of smoke hangs in the air as though patiently waiting for the impact of the destruction it has just wrought, the wall coated with black pigment in strokes that evoke a palpable sense of fear. With images of war, destruction, and trauma constantly accessible on our phones from the moment we wake up, Brzeski’s sculpture embodies the collective experience of trauma that we all share in our own ways. Inspired by the notion that “fire is nothing other than matter changing its form,” Brzeski employs polyurethane resin and carbon fibre matting to free himself from the darkness that surrounded him while growing up in a war-torn Wrocław in 1975.
Open until 6th May 2024, this exhibition at the Southbank Centre explores the potential that sculptural art holds in transforming our spaces, redefining artistic boundaries, and questioning form. It allows its artists space to grow, expand, contract, move, and illuminate without any visible limitations. As a result, the twenty-one international artists create a playful, bizarre, and extremely Instagram-friendly exhibition using an array of materials, allowing the audience to enjoy the whimsy in contemporary art. It also, however, employs this play with form to capture the impact that social conditions and our histories have on organic and physical bodies. The sculptures in this exhibition are a material manifestation of not just the impact of our emotions on our living, breathing bodies, but also our continuous and complex conversation with the natural world as we live through war, extreme industrialisation and environmental degradation.
Next to the main entrance of the exhibition is the HENI project space which houses Eva Fàbregas’s Pumping (2019), made from mixed materials including sensory balls, latex and silicone tubing. The result is a room bursting with large, interconnected tubes that occupy every inch of space and require the audience to walk around to the corner of the room, avoiding any tentacles. With twelve subwoofers installed within this complex and entangled system, the night-club music can not only be heard but felt by the audience. Coupled with the changing lights, creating constantly moving shadows, Fàbregas’s work almost feels alive and growing.
Attached to the ceiling with thin, visible wires that mimic intravenous lines given at a hospital, Pumping feels like a depiction of organic matter being assisted in its growth by the gallery. The small text guide placed at the entrance assists the audience in understanding the materials and ideas behind the work, but it avoids fixing any meaning onto the piece. This allows When Forms Come Alive to become an exhibition that helps the audience develop their ideas of what the work symbolises and take part in the creative process. Channelling the creativity of a diverse audience ultimately appears to be one of the main goals of this exhibition. Additionally, Pumping successfully enables us to think about the organic and physical body that is constantly growing and altering itself with its surroundings. While the room hosts this artwork, it is also what restricts its growth acting both as its host and its limiter.
Similarly in Marguerite Humeau’s The Holder of Wasp Vemon (2023) and The Guardian of Ancient Yeast (2023), the artist uses materials such as natural beeswax, microcrystalline wax, pigments, 150-year-old walnut (cause of death: unknown), handblown glass and wasp venom. Humeau uses organic materials and pairs them with man-made materials, to compare and contrast our interconnectedness with the natural world. On entering this room, an employee of the gallery gives the audience a piece of beeswax to feel the material from which a majority of the work is sculpted. This helps the audience further understand the complexity of creating these shapes and dimensions, but also our constant contact and communication with living bodies in the world especially on how they learn, adapt, grow and survive. At the same time, while using forms that are capable of outliving mankind, she focuses on the forms in nature that can outlive us and in some ways are our limiters.
When Forms Come Alivehas been criticised by some as an exhibition focusing on aesthetics and using the question of form to create art that does not engage with key notions of art history. However, if we look closely at the work in the exhibition, while being playful and full of odd shapes and moving bodies, it accurately does what it claims to do; it examines a movement within sculpture, incorporating Michel Blazy’s Bouquet Final (2012) - made from bath foam, water and scaffolding - resulting in a gigantic sculpture that includes falling and bending foam which miraculously holds its shape. It also includes Holly Hendry’s Sottobosco (2024), which is made from steel ducting, stainless steel, blown glass, concrete canvas, paint and other such materials to evoke the appearance of lichen, a fungus-algae and the oldest life form on Earth, in our buildings and architecture. The contrast of this organic, ancient life form surviving on a brutalist structure like the Southbank Centre, focuses again on the interconnectedness between humans and the organic world we may overlook daily.
The twenty-one artists in this exhibition come together to highlight, at a crucial stage of the climate crisis and ecological disasters, the inescapability of mankind from its living, growing and organic surroundings. It reminds us that while these fungi will survive our race, they currently co-habit our structures, reacting to the ever-growing human race. When Forms Come Alive allows artwork to escape frames and boundaries and highlights our ongoing conversation with nature, reminding its audience of our impact on our planet and its constant impact on us.
When Forms Come Alive is showing at Hayward Gallery until 6th May 2024.
One of the most poignant works in When Forms Come Alive at the Hayward Gallery is Olaf Brzeski’s Dream-Spontaneous Combustion (2008). Crafted from materials such as plywood, soot, and black pigment, Brzeski’s cloud of smoke hangs in the air as though patiently waiting for the impact of the destruction it has just wrought, the wall coated with black pigment in strokes that evoke a palpable sense of fear. With images of war, destruction, and trauma constantly accessible on our phones from the moment we wake up, Brzeski’s sculpture embodies the collective experience of trauma that we all share in our own ways. Inspired by the notion that “fire is nothing other than matter changing its form,” Brzeski employs polyurethane resin and carbon fibre matting to free himself from the darkness that surrounded him while growing up in a war-torn Wrocław in 1975.
Open until 6th May 2024, this exhibition at the Southbank Centre explores the potential that sculptural art holds in transforming our spaces, redefining artistic boundaries, and questioning form. It allows its artists space to grow, expand, contract, move, and illuminate without any visible limitations. As a result, the twenty-one international artists create a playful, bizarre, and extremely Instagram-friendly exhibition using an array of materials, allowing the audience to enjoy the whimsy in contemporary art. It also, however, employs this play with form to capture the impact that social conditions and our histories have on organic and physical bodies. The sculptures in this exhibition are a material manifestation of not just the impact of our emotions on our living, breathing bodies, but also our continuous and complex conversation with the natural world as we live through war, extreme industrialisation and environmental degradation.
Next to the main entrance of the exhibition is the HENI project space which houses Eva Fàbregas’s Pumping (2019), made from mixed materials including sensory balls, latex and silicone tubing. The result is a room bursting with large, interconnected tubes that occupy every inch of space and require the audience to walk around to the corner of the room, avoiding any tentacles. With twelve subwoofers installed within this complex and entangled system, the night-club music can not only be heard but felt by the audience. Coupled with the changing lights, creating constantly moving shadows, Fàbregas’s work almost feels alive and growing.
Attached to the ceiling with thin, visible wires that mimic intravenous lines given at a hospital, Pumping feels like a depiction of organic matter being assisted in its growth by the gallery. The small text guide placed at the entrance assists the audience in understanding the materials and ideas behind the work, but it avoids fixing any meaning onto the piece. This allows When Forms Come Alive to become an exhibition that helps the audience develop their ideas of what the work symbolises and take part in the creative process. Channelling the creativity of a diverse audience ultimately appears to be one of the main goals of this exhibition. Additionally, Pumping successfully enables us to think about the organic and physical body that is constantly growing and altering itself with its surroundings. While the room hosts this artwork, it is also what restricts its growth acting both as its host and its limiter.
Similarly in Marguerite Humeau’s The Holder of Wasp Vemon (2023) and The Guardian of Ancient Yeast (2023), the artist uses materials such as natural beeswax, microcrystalline wax, pigments, 150-year-old walnut (cause of death: unknown), handblown glass and wasp venom. Humeau uses organic materials and pairs them with man-made materials, to compare and contrast our interconnectedness with the natural world. On entering this room, an employee of the gallery gives the audience a piece of beeswax to feel the material from which a majority of the work is sculpted. This helps the audience further understand the complexity of creating these shapes and dimensions, but also our constant contact and communication with living bodies in the world especially on how they learn, adapt, grow and survive. At the same time, while using forms that are capable of outliving mankind, she focuses on the forms in nature that can outlive us and in some ways are our limiters.
When Forms Come Alivehas been criticised by some as an exhibition focusing on aesthetics and using the question of form to create art that does not engage with key notions of art history. However, if we look closely at the work in the exhibition, while being playful and full of odd shapes and moving bodies, it accurately does what it claims to do; it examines a movement within sculpture, incorporating Michel Blazy’s Bouquet Final (2012) - made from bath foam, water and scaffolding - resulting in a gigantic sculpture that includes falling and bending foam which miraculously holds its shape. It also includes Holly Hendry’s Sottobosco (2024), which is made from steel ducting, stainless steel, blown glass, concrete canvas, paint and other such materials to evoke the appearance of lichen, a fungus-algae and the oldest life form on Earth, in our buildings and architecture. The contrast of this organic, ancient life form surviving on a brutalist structure like the Southbank Centre, focuses again on the interconnectedness between humans and the organic world we may overlook daily.
The twenty-one artists in this exhibition come together to highlight, at a crucial stage of the climate crisis and ecological disasters, the inescapability of mankind from its living, growing and organic surroundings. It reminds us that while these fungi will survive our race, they currently co-habit our structures, reacting to the ever-growing human race. When Forms Come Alive allows artwork to escape frames and boundaries and highlights our ongoing conversation with nature, reminding its audience of our impact on our planet and its constant impact on us.
When Forms Come Alive is showing at Hayward Gallery until 6th May 2024.
One of the most poignant works in When Forms Come Alive at the Hayward Gallery is Olaf Brzeski’s Dream-Spontaneous Combustion (2008). Crafted from materials such as plywood, soot, and black pigment, Brzeski’s cloud of smoke hangs in the air as though patiently waiting for the impact of the destruction it has just wrought, the wall coated with black pigment in strokes that evoke a palpable sense of fear. With images of war, destruction, and trauma constantly accessible on our phones from the moment we wake up, Brzeski’s sculpture embodies the collective experience of trauma that we all share in our own ways. Inspired by the notion that “fire is nothing other than matter changing its form,” Brzeski employs polyurethane resin and carbon fibre matting to free himself from the darkness that surrounded him while growing up in a war-torn Wrocław in 1975.
Open until 6th May 2024, this exhibition at the Southbank Centre explores the potential that sculptural art holds in transforming our spaces, redefining artistic boundaries, and questioning form. It allows its artists space to grow, expand, contract, move, and illuminate without any visible limitations. As a result, the twenty-one international artists create a playful, bizarre, and extremely Instagram-friendly exhibition using an array of materials, allowing the audience to enjoy the whimsy in contemporary art. It also, however, employs this play with form to capture the impact that social conditions and our histories have on organic and physical bodies. The sculptures in this exhibition are a material manifestation of not just the impact of our emotions on our living, breathing bodies, but also our continuous and complex conversation with the natural world as we live through war, extreme industrialisation and environmental degradation.
Next to the main entrance of the exhibition is the HENI project space which houses Eva Fàbregas’s Pumping (2019), made from mixed materials including sensory balls, latex and silicone tubing. The result is a room bursting with large, interconnected tubes that occupy every inch of space and require the audience to walk around to the corner of the room, avoiding any tentacles. With twelve subwoofers installed within this complex and entangled system, the night-club music can not only be heard but felt by the audience. Coupled with the changing lights, creating constantly moving shadows, Fàbregas’s work almost feels alive and growing.
Attached to the ceiling with thin, visible wires that mimic intravenous lines given at a hospital, Pumping feels like a depiction of organic matter being assisted in its growth by the gallery. The small text guide placed at the entrance assists the audience in understanding the materials and ideas behind the work, but it avoids fixing any meaning onto the piece. This allows When Forms Come Alive to become an exhibition that helps the audience develop their ideas of what the work symbolises and take part in the creative process. Channelling the creativity of a diverse audience ultimately appears to be one of the main goals of this exhibition. Additionally, Pumping successfully enables us to think about the organic and physical body that is constantly growing and altering itself with its surroundings. While the room hosts this artwork, it is also what restricts its growth acting both as its host and its limiter.
Similarly in Marguerite Humeau’s The Holder of Wasp Vemon (2023) and The Guardian of Ancient Yeast (2023), the artist uses materials such as natural beeswax, microcrystalline wax, pigments, 150-year-old walnut (cause of death: unknown), handblown glass and wasp venom. Humeau uses organic materials and pairs them with man-made materials, to compare and contrast our interconnectedness with the natural world. On entering this room, an employee of the gallery gives the audience a piece of beeswax to feel the material from which a majority of the work is sculpted. This helps the audience further understand the complexity of creating these shapes and dimensions, but also our constant contact and communication with living bodies in the world especially on how they learn, adapt, grow and survive. At the same time, while using forms that are capable of outliving mankind, she focuses on the forms in nature that can outlive us and in some ways are our limiters.
When Forms Come Alivehas been criticised by some as an exhibition focusing on aesthetics and using the question of form to create art that does not engage with key notions of art history. However, if we look closely at the work in the exhibition, while being playful and full of odd shapes and moving bodies, it accurately does what it claims to do; it examines a movement within sculpture, incorporating Michel Blazy’s Bouquet Final (2012) - made from bath foam, water and scaffolding - resulting in a gigantic sculpture that includes falling and bending foam which miraculously holds its shape. It also includes Holly Hendry’s Sottobosco (2024), which is made from steel ducting, stainless steel, blown glass, concrete canvas, paint and other such materials to evoke the appearance of lichen, a fungus-algae and the oldest life form on Earth, in our buildings and architecture. The contrast of this organic, ancient life form surviving on a brutalist structure like the Southbank Centre, focuses again on the interconnectedness between humans and the organic world we may overlook daily.
The twenty-one artists in this exhibition come together to highlight, at a crucial stage of the climate crisis and ecological disasters, the inescapability of mankind from its living, growing and organic surroundings. It reminds us that while these fungi will survive our race, they currently co-habit our structures, reacting to the ever-growing human race. When Forms Come Alive allows artwork to escape frames and boundaries and highlights our ongoing conversation with nature, reminding its audience of our impact on our planet and its constant impact on us.
When Forms Come Alive is showing at Hayward Gallery until 6th May 2024.
One of the most poignant works in When Forms Come Alive at the Hayward Gallery is Olaf Brzeski’s Dream-Spontaneous Combustion (2008). Crafted from materials such as plywood, soot, and black pigment, Brzeski’s cloud of smoke hangs in the air as though patiently waiting for the impact of the destruction it has just wrought, the wall coated with black pigment in strokes that evoke a palpable sense of fear. With images of war, destruction, and trauma constantly accessible on our phones from the moment we wake up, Brzeski’s sculpture embodies the collective experience of trauma that we all share in our own ways. Inspired by the notion that “fire is nothing other than matter changing its form,” Brzeski employs polyurethane resin and carbon fibre matting to free himself from the darkness that surrounded him while growing up in a war-torn Wrocław in 1975.
Open until 6th May 2024, this exhibition at the Southbank Centre explores the potential that sculptural art holds in transforming our spaces, redefining artistic boundaries, and questioning form. It allows its artists space to grow, expand, contract, move, and illuminate without any visible limitations. As a result, the twenty-one international artists create a playful, bizarre, and extremely Instagram-friendly exhibition using an array of materials, allowing the audience to enjoy the whimsy in contemporary art. It also, however, employs this play with form to capture the impact that social conditions and our histories have on organic and physical bodies. The sculptures in this exhibition are a material manifestation of not just the impact of our emotions on our living, breathing bodies, but also our continuous and complex conversation with the natural world as we live through war, extreme industrialisation and environmental degradation.
Next to the main entrance of the exhibition is the HENI project space which houses Eva Fàbregas’s Pumping (2019), made from mixed materials including sensory balls, latex and silicone tubing. The result is a room bursting with large, interconnected tubes that occupy every inch of space and require the audience to walk around to the corner of the room, avoiding any tentacles. With twelve subwoofers installed within this complex and entangled system, the night-club music can not only be heard but felt by the audience. Coupled with the changing lights, creating constantly moving shadows, Fàbregas’s work almost feels alive and growing.
Attached to the ceiling with thin, visible wires that mimic intravenous lines given at a hospital, Pumping feels like a depiction of organic matter being assisted in its growth by the gallery. The small text guide placed at the entrance assists the audience in understanding the materials and ideas behind the work, but it avoids fixing any meaning onto the piece. This allows When Forms Come Alive to become an exhibition that helps the audience develop their ideas of what the work symbolises and take part in the creative process. Channelling the creativity of a diverse audience ultimately appears to be one of the main goals of this exhibition. Additionally, Pumping successfully enables us to think about the organic and physical body that is constantly growing and altering itself with its surroundings. While the room hosts this artwork, it is also what restricts its growth acting both as its host and its limiter.
Similarly in Marguerite Humeau’s The Holder of Wasp Vemon (2023) and The Guardian of Ancient Yeast (2023), the artist uses materials such as natural beeswax, microcrystalline wax, pigments, 150-year-old walnut (cause of death: unknown), handblown glass and wasp venom. Humeau uses organic materials and pairs them with man-made materials, to compare and contrast our interconnectedness with the natural world. On entering this room, an employee of the gallery gives the audience a piece of beeswax to feel the material from which a majority of the work is sculpted. This helps the audience further understand the complexity of creating these shapes and dimensions, but also our constant contact and communication with living bodies in the world especially on how they learn, adapt, grow and survive. At the same time, while using forms that are capable of outliving mankind, she focuses on the forms in nature that can outlive us and in some ways are our limiters.
When Forms Come Alivehas been criticised by some as an exhibition focusing on aesthetics and using the question of form to create art that does not engage with key notions of art history. However, if we look closely at the work in the exhibition, while being playful and full of odd shapes and moving bodies, it accurately does what it claims to do; it examines a movement within sculpture, incorporating Michel Blazy’s Bouquet Final (2012) - made from bath foam, water and scaffolding - resulting in a gigantic sculpture that includes falling and bending foam which miraculously holds its shape. It also includes Holly Hendry’s Sottobosco (2024), which is made from steel ducting, stainless steel, blown glass, concrete canvas, paint and other such materials to evoke the appearance of lichen, a fungus-algae and the oldest life form on Earth, in our buildings and architecture. The contrast of this organic, ancient life form surviving on a brutalist structure like the Southbank Centre, focuses again on the interconnectedness between humans and the organic world we may overlook daily.
The twenty-one artists in this exhibition come together to highlight, at a crucial stage of the climate crisis and ecological disasters, the inescapability of mankind from its living, growing and organic surroundings. It reminds us that while these fungi will survive our race, they currently co-habit our structures, reacting to the ever-growing human race. When Forms Come Alive allows artwork to escape frames and boundaries and highlights our ongoing conversation with nature, reminding its audience of our impact on our planet and its constant impact on us.
When Forms Come Alive is showing at Hayward Gallery until 6th May 2024.
One of the most poignant works in When Forms Come Alive at the Hayward Gallery is Olaf Brzeski’s Dream-Spontaneous Combustion (2008). Crafted from materials such as plywood, soot, and black pigment, Brzeski’s cloud of smoke hangs in the air as though patiently waiting for the impact of the destruction it has just wrought, the wall coated with black pigment in strokes that evoke a palpable sense of fear. With images of war, destruction, and trauma constantly accessible on our phones from the moment we wake up, Brzeski’s sculpture embodies the collective experience of trauma that we all share in our own ways. Inspired by the notion that “fire is nothing other than matter changing its form,” Brzeski employs polyurethane resin and carbon fibre matting to free himself from the darkness that surrounded him while growing up in a war-torn Wrocław in 1975.
Open until 6th May 2024, this exhibition at the Southbank Centre explores the potential that sculptural art holds in transforming our spaces, redefining artistic boundaries, and questioning form. It allows its artists space to grow, expand, contract, move, and illuminate without any visible limitations. As a result, the twenty-one international artists create a playful, bizarre, and extremely Instagram-friendly exhibition using an array of materials, allowing the audience to enjoy the whimsy in contemporary art. It also, however, employs this play with form to capture the impact that social conditions and our histories have on organic and physical bodies. The sculptures in this exhibition are a material manifestation of not just the impact of our emotions on our living, breathing bodies, but also our continuous and complex conversation with the natural world as we live through war, extreme industrialisation and environmental degradation.
Next to the main entrance of the exhibition is the HENI project space which houses Eva Fàbregas’s Pumping (2019), made from mixed materials including sensory balls, latex and silicone tubing. The result is a room bursting with large, interconnected tubes that occupy every inch of space and require the audience to walk around to the corner of the room, avoiding any tentacles. With twelve subwoofers installed within this complex and entangled system, the night-club music can not only be heard but felt by the audience. Coupled with the changing lights, creating constantly moving shadows, Fàbregas’s work almost feels alive and growing.
Attached to the ceiling with thin, visible wires that mimic intravenous lines given at a hospital, Pumping feels like a depiction of organic matter being assisted in its growth by the gallery. The small text guide placed at the entrance assists the audience in understanding the materials and ideas behind the work, but it avoids fixing any meaning onto the piece. This allows When Forms Come Alive to become an exhibition that helps the audience develop their ideas of what the work symbolises and take part in the creative process. Channelling the creativity of a diverse audience ultimately appears to be one of the main goals of this exhibition. Additionally, Pumping successfully enables us to think about the organic and physical body that is constantly growing and altering itself with its surroundings. While the room hosts this artwork, it is also what restricts its growth acting both as its host and its limiter.
Similarly in Marguerite Humeau’s The Holder of Wasp Vemon (2023) and The Guardian of Ancient Yeast (2023), the artist uses materials such as natural beeswax, microcrystalline wax, pigments, 150-year-old walnut (cause of death: unknown), handblown glass and wasp venom. Humeau uses organic materials and pairs them with man-made materials, to compare and contrast our interconnectedness with the natural world. On entering this room, an employee of the gallery gives the audience a piece of beeswax to feel the material from which a majority of the work is sculpted. This helps the audience further understand the complexity of creating these shapes and dimensions, but also our constant contact and communication with living bodies in the world especially on how they learn, adapt, grow and survive. At the same time, while using forms that are capable of outliving mankind, she focuses on the forms in nature that can outlive us and in some ways are our limiters.
When Forms Come Alivehas been criticised by some as an exhibition focusing on aesthetics and using the question of form to create art that does not engage with key notions of art history. However, if we look closely at the work in the exhibition, while being playful and full of odd shapes and moving bodies, it accurately does what it claims to do; it examines a movement within sculpture, incorporating Michel Blazy’s Bouquet Final (2012) - made from bath foam, water and scaffolding - resulting in a gigantic sculpture that includes falling and bending foam which miraculously holds its shape. It also includes Holly Hendry’s Sottobosco (2024), which is made from steel ducting, stainless steel, blown glass, concrete canvas, paint and other such materials to evoke the appearance of lichen, a fungus-algae and the oldest life form on Earth, in our buildings and architecture. The contrast of this organic, ancient life form surviving on a brutalist structure like the Southbank Centre, focuses again on the interconnectedness between humans and the organic world we may overlook daily.
The twenty-one artists in this exhibition come together to highlight, at a crucial stage of the climate crisis and ecological disasters, the inescapability of mankind from its living, growing and organic surroundings. It reminds us that while these fungi will survive our race, they currently co-habit our structures, reacting to the ever-growing human race. When Forms Come Alive allows artwork to escape frames and boundaries and highlights our ongoing conversation with nature, reminding its audience of our impact on our planet and its constant impact on us.
When Forms Come Alive is showing at Hayward Gallery until 6th May 2024.
One of the most poignant works in When Forms Come Alive at the Hayward Gallery is Olaf Brzeski’s Dream-Spontaneous Combustion (2008). Crafted from materials such as plywood, soot, and black pigment, Brzeski’s cloud of smoke hangs in the air as though patiently waiting for the impact of the destruction it has just wrought, the wall coated with black pigment in strokes that evoke a palpable sense of fear. With images of war, destruction, and trauma constantly accessible on our phones from the moment we wake up, Brzeski’s sculpture embodies the collective experience of trauma that we all share in our own ways. Inspired by the notion that “fire is nothing other than matter changing its form,” Brzeski employs polyurethane resin and carbon fibre matting to free himself from the darkness that surrounded him while growing up in a war-torn Wrocław in 1975.
Open until 6th May 2024, this exhibition at the Southbank Centre explores the potential that sculptural art holds in transforming our spaces, redefining artistic boundaries, and questioning form. It allows its artists space to grow, expand, contract, move, and illuminate without any visible limitations. As a result, the twenty-one international artists create a playful, bizarre, and extremely Instagram-friendly exhibition using an array of materials, allowing the audience to enjoy the whimsy in contemporary art. It also, however, employs this play with form to capture the impact that social conditions and our histories have on organic and physical bodies. The sculptures in this exhibition are a material manifestation of not just the impact of our emotions on our living, breathing bodies, but also our continuous and complex conversation with the natural world as we live through war, extreme industrialisation and environmental degradation.
Next to the main entrance of the exhibition is the HENI project space which houses Eva Fàbregas’s Pumping (2019), made from mixed materials including sensory balls, latex and silicone tubing. The result is a room bursting with large, interconnected tubes that occupy every inch of space and require the audience to walk around to the corner of the room, avoiding any tentacles. With twelve subwoofers installed within this complex and entangled system, the night-club music can not only be heard but felt by the audience. Coupled with the changing lights, creating constantly moving shadows, Fàbregas’s work almost feels alive and growing.
Attached to the ceiling with thin, visible wires that mimic intravenous lines given at a hospital, Pumping feels like a depiction of organic matter being assisted in its growth by the gallery. The small text guide placed at the entrance assists the audience in understanding the materials and ideas behind the work, but it avoids fixing any meaning onto the piece. This allows When Forms Come Alive to become an exhibition that helps the audience develop their ideas of what the work symbolises and take part in the creative process. Channelling the creativity of a diverse audience ultimately appears to be one of the main goals of this exhibition. Additionally, Pumping successfully enables us to think about the organic and physical body that is constantly growing and altering itself with its surroundings. While the room hosts this artwork, it is also what restricts its growth acting both as its host and its limiter.
Similarly in Marguerite Humeau’s The Holder of Wasp Vemon (2023) and The Guardian of Ancient Yeast (2023), the artist uses materials such as natural beeswax, microcrystalline wax, pigments, 150-year-old walnut (cause of death: unknown), handblown glass and wasp venom. Humeau uses organic materials and pairs them with man-made materials, to compare and contrast our interconnectedness with the natural world. On entering this room, an employee of the gallery gives the audience a piece of beeswax to feel the material from which a majority of the work is sculpted. This helps the audience further understand the complexity of creating these shapes and dimensions, but also our constant contact and communication with living bodies in the world especially on how they learn, adapt, grow and survive. At the same time, while using forms that are capable of outliving mankind, she focuses on the forms in nature that can outlive us and in some ways are our limiters.
When Forms Come Alivehas been criticised by some as an exhibition focusing on aesthetics and using the question of form to create art that does not engage with key notions of art history. However, if we look closely at the work in the exhibition, while being playful and full of odd shapes and moving bodies, it accurately does what it claims to do; it examines a movement within sculpture, incorporating Michel Blazy’s Bouquet Final (2012) - made from bath foam, water and scaffolding - resulting in a gigantic sculpture that includes falling and bending foam which miraculously holds its shape. It also includes Holly Hendry’s Sottobosco (2024), which is made from steel ducting, stainless steel, blown glass, concrete canvas, paint and other such materials to evoke the appearance of lichen, a fungus-algae and the oldest life form on Earth, in our buildings and architecture. The contrast of this organic, ancient life form surviving on a brutalist structure like the Southbank Centre, focuses again on the interconnectedness between humans and the organic world we may overlook daily.
The twenty-one artists in this exhibition come together to highlight, at a crucial stage of the climate crisis and ecological disasters, the inescapability of mankind from its living, growing and organic surroundings. It reminds us that while these fungi will survive our race, they currently co-habit our structures, reacting to the ever-growing human race. When Forms Come Alive allows artwork to escape frames and boundaries and highlights our ongoing conversation with nature, reminding its audience of our impact on our planet and its constant impact on us.
When Forms Come Alive is showing at Hayward Gallery until 6th May 2024.
One of the most poignant works in When Forms Come Alive at the Hayward Gallery is Olaf Brzeski’s Dream-Spontaneous Combustion (2008). Crafted from materials such as plywood, soot, and black pigment, Brzeski’s cloud of smoke hangs in the air as though patiently waiting for the impact of the destruction it has just wrought, the wall coated with black pigment in strokes that evoke a palpable sense of fear. With images of war, destruction, and trauma constantly accessible on our phones from the moment we wake up, Brzeski’s sculpture embodies the collective experience of trauma that we all share in our own ways. Inspired by the notion that “fire is nothing other than matter changing its form,” Brzeski employs polyurethane resin and carbon fibre matting to free himself from the darkness that surrounded him while growing up in a war-torn Wrocław in 1975.
Open until 6th May 2024, this exhibition at the Southbank Centre explores the potential that sculptural art holds in transforming our spaces, redefining artistic boundaries, and questioning form. It allows its artists space to grow, expand, contract, move, and illuminate without any visible limitations. As a result, the twenty-one international artists create a playful, bizarre, and extremely Instagram-friendly exhibition using an array of materials, allowing the audience to enjoy the whimsy in contemporary art. It also, however, employs this play with form to capture the impact that social conditions and our histories have on organic and physical bodies. The sculptures in this exhibition are a material manifestation of not just the impact of our emotions on our living, breathing bodies, but also our continuous and complex conversation with the natural world as we live through war, extreme industrialisation and environmental degradation.
Next to the main entrance of the exhibition is the HENI project space which houses Eva Fàbregas’s Pumping (2019), made from mixed materials including sensory balls, latex and silicone tubing. The result is a room bursting with large, interconnected tubes that occupy every inch of space and require the audience to walk around to the corner of the room, avoiding any tentacles. With twelve subwoofers installed within this complex and entangled system, the night-club music can not only be heard but felt by the audience. Coupled with the changing lights, creating constantly moving shadows, Fàbregas’s work almost feels alive and growing.
Attached to the ceiling with thin, visible wires that mimic intravenous lines given at a hospital, Pumping feels like a depiction of organic matter being assisted in its growth by the gallery. The small text guide placed at the entrance assists the audience in understanding the materials and ideas behind the work, but it avoids fixing any meaning onto the piece. This allows When Forms Come Alive to become an exhibition that helps the audience develop their ideas of what the work symbolises and take part in the creative process. Channelling the creativity of a diverse audience ultimately appears to be one of the main goals of this exhibition. Additionally, Pumping successfully enables us to think about the organic and physical body that is constantly growing and altering itself with its surroundings. While the room hosts this artwork, it is also what restricts its growth acting both as its host and its limiter.
Similarly in Marguerite Humeau’s The Holder of Wasp Vemon (2023) and The Guardian of Ancient Yeast (2023), the artist uses materials such as natural beeswax, microcrystalline wax, pigments, 150-year-old walnut (cause of death: unknown), handblown glass and wasp venom. Humeau uses organic materials and pairs them with man-made materials, to compare and contrast our interconnectedness with the natural world. On entering this room, an employee of the gallery gives the audience a piece of beeswax to feel the material from which a majority of the work is sculpted. This helps the audience further understand the complexity of creating these shapes and dimensions, but also our constant contact and communication with living bodies in the world especially on how they learn, adapt, grow and survive. At the same time, while using forms that are capable of outliving mankind, she focuses on the forms in nature that can outlive us and in some ways are our limiters.
When Forms Come Alivehas been criticised by some as an exhibition focusing on aesthetics and using the question of form to create art that does not engage with key notions of art history. However, if we look closely at the work in the exhibition, while being playful and full of odd shapes and moving bodies, it accurately does what it claims to do; it examines a movement within sculpture, incorporating Michel Blazy’s Bouquet Final (2012) - made from bath foam, water and scaffolding - resulting in a gigantic sculpture that includes falling and bending foam which miraculously holds its shape. It also includes Holly Hendry’s Sottobosco (2024), which is made from steel ducting, stainless steel, blown glass, concrete canvas, paint and other such materials to evoke the appearance of lichen, a fungus-algae and the oldest life form on Earth, in our buildings and architecture. The contrast of this organic, ancient life form surviving on a brutalist structure like the Southbank Centre, focuses again on the interconnectedness between humans and the organic world we may overlook daily.
The twenty-one artists in this exhibition come together to highlight, at a crucial stage of the climate crisis and ecological disasters, the inescapability of mankind from its living, growing and organic surroundings. It reminds us that while these fungi will survive our race, they currently co-habit our structures, reacting to the ever-growing human race. When Forms Come Alive allows artwork to escape frames and boundaries and highlights our ongoing conversation with nature, reminding its audience of our impact on our planet and its constant impact on us.
When Forms Come Alive is showing at Hayward Gallery until 6th May 2024.
One of the most poignant works in When Forms Come Alive at the Hayward Gallery is Olaf Brzeski’s Dream-Spontaneous Combustion (2008). Crafted from materials such as plywood, soot, and black pigment, Brzeski’s cloud of smoke hangs in the air as though patiently waiting for the impact of the destruction it has just wrought, the wall coated with black pigment in strokes that evoke a palpable sense of fear. With images of war, destruction, and trauma constantly accessible on our phones from the moment we wake up, Brzeski’s sculpture embodies the collective experience of trauma that we all share in our own ways. Inspired by the notion that “fire is nothing other than matter changing its form,” Brzeski employs polyurethane resin and carbon fibre matting to free himself from the darkness that surrounded him while growing up in a war-torn Wrocław in 1975.
Open until 6th May 2024, this exhibition at the Southbank Centre explores the potential that sculptural art holds in transforming our spaces, redefining artistic boundaries, and questioning form. It allows its artists space to grow, expand, contract, move, and illuminate without any visible limitations. As a result, the twenty-one international artists create a playful, bizarre, and extremely Instagram-friendly exhibition using an array of materials, allowing the audience to enjoy the whimsy in contemporary art. It also, however, employs this play with form to capture the impact that social conditions and our histories have on organic and physical bodies. The sculptures in this exhibition are a material manifestation of not just the impact of our emotions on our living, breathing bodies, but also our continuous and complex conversation with the natural world as we live through war, extreme industrialisation and environmental degradation.
Next to the main entrance of the exhibition is the HENI project space which houses Eva Fàbregas’s Pumping (2019), made from mixed materials including sensory balls, latex and silicone tubing. The result is a room bursting with large, interconnected tubes that occupy every inch of space and require the audience to walk around to the corner of the room, avoiding any tentacles. With twelve subwoofers installed within this complex and entangled system, the night-club music can not only be heard but felt by the audience. Coupled with the changing lights, creating constantly moving shadows, Fàbregas’s work almost feels alive and growing.
Attached to the ceiling with thin, visible wires that mimic intravenous lines given at a hospital, Pumping feels like a depiction of organic matter being assisted in its growth by the gallery. The small text guide placed at the entrance assists the audience in understanding the materials and ideas behind the work, but it avoids fixing any meaning onto the piece. This allows When Forms Come Alive to become an exhibition that helps the audience develop their ideas of what the work symbolises and take part in the creative process. Channelling the creativity of a diverse audience ultimately appears to be one of the main goals of this exhibition. Additionally, Pumping successfully enables us to think about the organic and physical body that is constantly growing and altering itself with its surroundings. While the room hosts this artwork, it is also what restricts its growth acting both as its host and its limiter.
Similarly in Marguerite Humeau’s The Holder of Wasp Vemon (2023) and The Guardian of Ancient Yeast (2023), the artist uses materials such as natural beeswax, microcrystalline wax, pigments, 150-year-old walnut (cause of death: unknown), handblown glass and wasp venom. Humeau uses organic materials and pairs them with man-made materials, to compare and contrast our interconnectedness with the natural world. On entering this room, an employee of the gallery gives the audience a piece of beeswax to feel the material from which a majority of the work is sculpted. This helps the audience further understand the complexity of creating these shapes and dimensions, but also our constant contact and communication with living bodies in the world especially on how they learn, adapt, grow and survive. At the same time, while using forms that are capable of outliving mankind, she focuses on the forms in nature that can outlive us and in some ways are our limiters.
When Forms Come Alivehas been criticised by some as an exhibition focusing on aesthetics and using the question of form to create art that does not engage with key notions of art history. However, if we look closely at the work in the exhibition, while being playful and full of odd shapes and moving bodies, it accurately does what it claims to do; it examines a movement within sculpture, incorporating Michel Blazy’s Bouquet Final (2012) - made from bath foam, water and scaffolding - resulting in a gigantic sculpture that includes falling and bending foam which miraculously holds its shape. It also includes Holly Hendry’s Sottobosco (2024), which is made from steel ducting, stainless steel, blown glass, concrete canvas, paint and other such materials to evoke the appearance of lichen, a fungus-algae and the oldest life form on Earth, in our buildings and architecture. The contrast of this organic, ancient life form surviving on a brutalist structure like the Southbank Centre, focuses again on the interconnectedness between humans and the organic world we may overlook daily.
The twenty-one artists in this exhibition come together to highlight, at a crucial stage of the climate crisis and ecological disasters, the inescapability of mankind from its living, growing and organic surroundings. It reminds us that while these fungi will survive our race, they currently co-habit our structures, reacting to the ever-growing human race. When Forms Come Alive allows artwork to escape frames and boundaries and highlights our ongoing conversation with nature, reminding its audience of our impact on our planet and its constant impact on us.
When Forms Come Alive is showing at Hayward Gallery until 6th May 2024.
One of the most poignant works in When Forms Come Alive at the Hayward Gallery is Olaf Brzeski’s Dream-Spontaneous Combustion (2008). Crafted from materials such as plywood, soot, and black pigment, Brzeski’s cloud of smoke hangs in the air as though patiently waiting for the impact of the destruction it has just wrought, the wall coated with black pigment in strokes that evoke a palpable sense of fear. With images of war, destruction, and trauma constantly accessible on our phones from the moment we wake up, Brzeski’s sculpture embodies the collective experience of trauma that we all share in our own ways. Inspired by the notion that “fire is nothing other than matter changing its form,” Brzeski employs polyurethane resin and carbon fibre matting to free himself from the darkness that surrounded him while growing up in a war-torn Wrocław in 1975.
Open until 6th May 2024, this exhibition at the Southbank Centre explores the potential that sculptural art holds in transforming our spaces, redefining artistic boundaries, and questioning form. It allows its artists space to grow, expand, contract, move, and illuminate without any visible limitations. As a result, the twenty-one international artists create a playful, bizarre, and extremely Instagram-friendly exhibition using an array of materials, allowing the audience to enjoy the whimsy in contemporary art. It also, however, employs this play with form to capture the impact that social conditions and our histories have on organic and physical bodies. The sculptures in this exhibition are a material manifestation of not just the impact of our emotions on our living, breathing bodies, but also our continuous and complex conversation with the natural world as we live through war, extreme industrialisation and environmental degradation.
Next to the main entrance of the exhibition is the HENI project space which houses Eva Fàbregas’s Pumping (2019), made from mixed materials including sensory balls, latex and silicone tubing. The result is a room bursting with large, interconnected tubes that occupy every inch of space and require the audience to walk around to the corner of the room, avoiding any tentacles. With twelve subwoofers installed within this complex and entangled system, the night-club music can not only be heard but felt by the audience. Coupled with the changing lights, creating constantly moving shadows, Fàbregas’s work almost feels alive and growing.
Attached to the ceiling with thin, visible wires that mimic intravenous lines given at a hospital, Pumping feels like a depiction of organic matter being assisted in its growth by the gallery. The small text guide placed at the entrance assists the audience in understanding the materials and ideas behind the work, but it avoids fixing any meaning onto the piece. This allows When Forms Come Alive to become an exhibition that helps the audience develop their ideas of what the work symbolises and take part in the creative process. Channelling the creativity of a diverse audience ultimately appears to be one of the main goals of this exhibition. Additionally, Pumping successfully enables us to think about the organic and physical body that is constantly growing and altering itself with its surroundings. While the room hosts this artwork, it is also what restricts its growth acting both as its host and its limiter.
Similarly in Marguerite Humeau’s The Holder of Wasp Vemon (2023) and The Guardian of Ancient Yeast (2023), the artist uses materials such as natural beeswax, microcrystalline wax, pigments, 150-year-old walnut (cause of death: unknown), handblown glass and wasp venom. Humeau uses organic materials and pairs them with man-made materials, to compare and contrast our interconnectedness with the natural world. On entering this room, an employee of the gallery gives the audience a piece of beeswax to feel the material from which a majority of the work is sculpted. This helps the audience further understand the complexity of creating these shapes and dimensions, but also our constant contact and communication with living bodies in the world especially on how they learn, adapt, grow and survive. At the same time, while using forms that are capable of outliving mankind, she focuses on the forms in nature that can outlive us and in some ways are our limiters.
When Forms Come Alivehas been criticised by some as an exhibition focusing on aesthetics and using the question of form to create art that does not engage with key notions of art history. However, if we look closely at the work in the exhibition, while being playful and full of odd shapes and moving bodies, it accurately does what it claims to do; it examines a movement within sculpture, incorporating Michel Blazy’s Bouquet Final (2012) - made from bath foam, water and scaffolding - resulting in a gigantic sculpture that includes falling and bending foam which miraculously holds its shape. It also includes Holly Hendry’s Sottobosco (2024), which is made from steel ducting, stainless steel, blown glass, concrete canvas, paint and other such materials to evoke the appearance of lichen, a fungus-algae and the oldest life form on Earth, in our buildings and architecture. The contrast of this organic, ancient life form surviving on a brutalist structure like the Southbank Centre, focuses again on the interconnectedness between humans and the organic world we may overlook daily.
The twenty-one artists in this exhibition come together to highlight, at a crucial stage of the climate crisis and ecological disasters, the inescapability of mankind from its living, growing and organic surroundings. It reminds us that while these fungi will survive our race, they currently co-habit our structures, reacting to the ever-growing human race. When Forms Come Alive allows artwork to escape frames and boundaries and highlights our ongoing conversation with nature, reminding its audience of our impact on our planet and its constant impact on us.
When Forms Come Alive is showing at Hayward Gallery until 6th May 2024.
One of the most poignant works in When Forms Come Alive at the Hayward Gallery is Olaf Brzeski’s Dream-Spontaneous Combustion (2008). Crafted from materials such as plywood, soot, and black pigment, Brzeski’s cloud of smoke hangs in the air as though patiently waiting for the impact of the destruction it has just wrought, the wall coated with black pigment in strokes that evoke a palpable sense of fear. With images of war, destruction, and trauma constantly accessible on our phones from the moment we wake up, Brzeski’s sculpture embodies the collective experience of trauma that we all share in our own ways. Inspired by the notion that “fire is nothing other than matter changing its form,” Brzeski employs polyurethane resin and carbon fibre matting to free himself from the darkness that surrounded him while growing up in a war-torn Wrocław in 1975.
Open until 6th May 2024, this exhibition at the Southbank Centre explores the potential that sculptural art holds in transforming our spaces, redefining artistic boundaries, and questioning form. It allows its artists space to grow, expand, contract, move, and illuminate without any visible limitations. As a result, the twenty-one international artists create a playful, bizarre, and extremely Instagram-friendly exhibition using an array of materials, allowing the audience to enjoy the whimsy in contemporary art. It also, however, employs this play with form to capture the impact that social conditions and our histories have on organic and physical bodies. The sculptures in this exhibition are a material manifestation of not just the impact of our emotions on our living, breathing bodies, but also our continuous and complex conversation with the natural world as we live through war, extreme industrialisation and environmental degradation.
Next to the main entrance of the exhibition is the HENI project space which houses Eva Fàbregas’s Pumping (2019), made from mixed materials including sensory balls, latex and silicone tubing. The result is a room bursting with large, interconnected tubes that occupy every inch of space and require the audience to walk around to the corner of the room, avoiding any tentacles. With twelve subwoofers installed within this complex and entangled system, the night-club music can not only be heard but felt by the audience. Coupled with the changing lights, creating constantly moving shadows, Fàbregas’s work almost feels alive and growing.
Attached to the ceiling with thin, visible wires that mimic intravenous lines given at a hospital, Pumping feels like a depiction of organic matter being assisted in its growth by the gallery. The small text guide placed at the entrance assists the audience in understanding the materials and ideas behind the work, but it avoids fixing any meaning onto the piece. This allows When Forms Come Alive to become an exhibition that helps the audience develop their ideas of what the work symbolises and take part in the creative process. Channelling the creativity of a diverse audience ultimately appears to be one of the main goals of this exhibition. Additionally, Pumping successfully enables us to think about the organic and physical body that is constantly growing and altering itself with its surroundings. While the room hosts this artwork, it is also what restricts its growth acting both as its host and its limiter.
Similarly in Marguerite Humeau’s The Holder of Wasp Vemon (2023) and The Guardian of Ancient Yeast (2023), the artist uses materials such as natural beeswax, microcrystalline wax, pigments, 150-year-old walnut (cause of death: unknown), handblown glass and wasp venom. Humeau uses organic materials and pairs them with man-made materials, to compare and contrast our interconnectedness with the natural world. On entering this room, an employee of the gallery gives the audience a piece of beeswax to feel the material from which a majority of the work is sculpted. This helps the audience further understand the complexity of creating these shapes and dimensions, but also our constant contact and communication with living bodies in the world especially on how they learn, adapt, grow and survive. At the same time, while using forms that are capable of outliving mankind, she focuses on the forms in nature that can outlive us and in some ways are our limiters.
When Forms Come Alivehas been criticised by some as an exhibition focusing on aesthetics and using the question of form to create art that does not engage with key notions of art history. However, if we look closely at the work in the exhibition, while being playful and full of odd shapes and moving bodies, it accurately does what it claims to do; it examines a movement within sculpture, incorporating Michel Blazy’s Bouquet Final (2012) - made from bath foam, water and scaffolding - resulting in a gigantic sculpture that includes falling and bending foam which miraculously holds its shape. It also includes Holly Hendry’s Sottobosco (2024), which is made from steel ducting, stainless steel, blown glass, concrete canvas, paint and other such materials to evoke the appearance of lichen, a fungus-algae and the oldest life form on Earth, in our buildings and architecture. The contrast of this organic, ancient life form surviving on a brutalist structure like the Southbank Centre, focuses again on the interconnectedness between humans and the organic world we may overlook daily.
The twenty-one artists in this exhibition come together to highlight, at a crucial stage of the climate crisis and ecological disasters, the inescapability of mankind from its living, growing and organic surroundings. It reminds us that while these fungi will survive our race, they currently co-habit our structures, reacting to the ever-growing human race. When Forms Come Alive allows artwork to escape frames and boundaries and highlights our ongoing conversation with nature, reminding its audience of our impact on our planet and its constant impact on us.
When Forms Come Alive is showing at Hayward Gallery until 6th May 2024.
