Roger Hiorns: “A quiet activity in the transformation of forms.”[1]

       Roger Hiorns is not here. He was, but he left. The works hum with his departure, a slight frisson, inaudible and alive. Detergent foam drips lethargically from hollows and crevices. Crystal swellings gather the light in blue needles, adding their lustre to the wet glisten of brain matter. The air is laced with faint odours, chemical and cloying. The space has become a laboratory of self-regulating specimens; a seething hush, populated by unnatural growths and inorganic seepages.

Hiorns has left his works to their own devices, constructing the before and leaving the after to blossom on its own, in calculated and deliberate disassociation. He understands his materials. He trusts in their whims and eccentricities, knowing that they will bud and ooze, creep and meander in changeable forms. Foam, fire, copper sulphate crystals: Hiorns elects mutable materials with a life of their own. When these materials are loosed, familiar objects become subversively fertile, self-generative. Hiorns plants the seed of material colonization, and waits as it takes over.

“Sculpture is slow, and object-making is very slow. The object is being made, is made by the reaction that happens over time, these materials are introduced to each other.”[2]

The creative tempo is sluggish, reflecting the laborious nature of sculptural processes. Overlooked acts are recreated in unfamiliar ways, by alien materials. The hands are withdrawn, their agency assumed by chemical processes. These are materials that re-mysticise the act of making.

“We’re surrounded by codified practices consistently imposed on us by dominant objects. We’re under a narrow coercion from the objects that we design for ourselves […] Can we retool our objects, perhaps? What would that involve, and is it possible to transgress the continuous production of next-generation objects, to insert transgressive stimulus, the cross of semen and the light bulb, for example?”[3]

The introduction of materials is an attempt to transgress accepted processes of object reproduction. The works do not emerge organically: generative processes occur by cross-fertilisation. They are not born, but seeded. Cultured. Hiorns rejects a parental relationship, denying the maternal processes associated with the creation of artworks. He does not give birth to his works: he inseminates them, with ideas and with agency. The emerging cross-breeds – between artist and object, or between species of materials – enable a new appraisal, a fresh perspective brought about by a material change. Notions of function are dramatically undermined, as recognisable objects, a car engine or a ceramic vessel (or a light bulb) dissolve into material ambiguity. The coersive power of dominant objects is languorously muffled, as they become merely a physical purchase upon which ideas and impressions collect, crystalise and dissolve.

Group forms. Six marine molluscs linger in the black; umbilical wires anchor them to the floor, their stacked ceramic forms suspended in throbbing silence. Foamy mucus slinks upwards in a streaming burp, then collapses. Their spent effort collects in mute clouds on the floor. Hiorns has no control over their tumbling secretions: the shapes they form are the whim of the moment, sculpted by the pressure of the compressor, or the shape of the vessel, or the breath of the observer. What he makes are empty husks, pumped full of measured autonomy. The work makes itself.

The vessels’ use, their ‘coercive power’ as familiar objects, is hushed. The propagation of foam becomes a means of stepping back from the object, at once a covering up and a revealing. The properties of the vessel are inverted – the receptacle refuses to receive, instead it gives. Its hollowness is filled with unseen transformation: what emerges is neither liquid nor solid nor gas, but a substance which, like the works themselves, hovers between definitions. Its familiar warming presence – hot baths and soapy hands – is invasive and strange, as the vessels eject the foam forced on them by a lifetime of washing up.

The metaphorical associations of these foaming streams are effervescent, swimming with half-formed ideas. The lazy sexuality of their smooth release is palpable, yet their artificial odor confuses bodily connotations, drifting tantalisingly between the corporeal and the chemical. The aftermath of the vessels’ elemental offering dissolves into a wet puddle, and later evaporates completely, leaving only a dark smear on the concrete. Hiorns refers to these remnants as ‘the stain of life’, slippery residues that mark many of his works, documenting secret acts and hidden transformations.

The most arresting of these furtive transformations is undoubtedly the creeping colonization of copper sulphate crystals; the illegitimate progeny of solid and liquid, clandestinely reproducing beneath a watery veil. Their glaring blue is insistent, eye-piercing, conjuring a plethora of disjointed associations. They are ice crystals, breathless and shivering. They are precious stones, priceless and alluring. They are salt clusters, saline and corrosive.

Copper sulphate first blossomed for Hiorns as a sculptural material in the late 1990s, clustering the facades of Copper Sulphate Chartres & Copper Sulphate Notre-Dame (1996). Hiorns constructed the two miniature cardboard cathedrals from flat pack kits, coated them in copper sulphate solution, and waited as the crystals erupted in impossible slowness, one on top of the other, enveloping the spires of each cathedral in hard blue growth. Vegetal clusters dotted the cardboard like aquatic mould, bristling with parasitic animacy.

This first exploratory application unleashed the crystals’ autonomous agency. It began as an exploration of religion’s centralised focus, swelling outwards from the focal point of the altar. The crystals offered a means to enact the spatial migration of religious power, their blueness appropriate in its baroque exuberance. Hiorns’ own relationship with the crystals, too, is outward-multiplying. Their scale and reach increases with each work, swelling in potency. Yet Hiorns does not rally the crystals in order to reinforce an omnipotent authority: the crystals answer only to themselves.

While the crystals glare in blue assertiveness, other materials are dull and mute. Untitled (2013), first shown at the 2013 Venice Biennale, is strewn in the centre of the room in an ashy carpet, a silky void that seems to absorb sound. It consists of the pulverised dust of a granite altar stone, ground down to a velvety powder. The total and irreversible act of pulverising such a vested object seems anarchic and destructive, but the metamorphosis of its form invests the altar stone with a completely new set of properties. The stone’s rigidity dissolves into a fluid pool of fresh possibility, its associative power dispersed by material alteration.

Such physical residues linger throughout the exhibition, infiltrating the senses. A series of metal sculptures are displayed casually, propped up against the white gallery wall. They lean in a line like men at a urinal, their scale and stance curiously human. The stains that tarnish their surfaces might be human too. The blotchy, spontaneous outlines are unsettling, suggestive of organic secretions; the tell-tale evidence of sordid acts, or the wasted remnants of cross-material breeding.

The sexuality of these sculptures is both stark and gentle. Some are punctured by slots, slits, circles and squares, like children’s puzzles with the blocks missing. Or un-manned glory holes. Untitled (2004) opens its steel mouth in an ‘O’ of surprise, or welcome, or pain. Creed is lacerated by two perfect shapes, a square and a circle; the perfume-stain hovers somewhere between the two, an irregular blotch, missing its target.

Most of the perfume’s substance was expended in the moment of it secretion, fleeing out windows and up noses, but something lingers in the dry blueprint of its brief wetness. These stains still smell, leaching odours into the gallery. L’heure bleue, cloying and ingratiating, is described by perfume retailers as “A heady blend of roses, iris, and jasmine, laced with an intriguing background of vanilla and musk. L’Heure Bleue is intimate, emotional, and utterly refined.”[4] Hiorns’ L’heure Bleue is a shapeless blotch, awkwardly fragrancing a steel crotch. The patch left by the perfume forces the viewer to crouch down obscenely and sniff at its fading odour.

Smell is the most cunning of the senses; scents bypass the consciousness, triggering chemical impulses and conjuring unsolicited images. Despite their fleeting liquidity, these perfumes are dominant objects, powerfully coercive.

“Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.”[5]

Musk is a traditional base-note for expensive perfumes. It is extracted from the male musk deer, who advertises his sexual readiness with a waft of earthy pungence, secreted from a gland near his genitals. Ambergris, another traditional base-note, is produced in the bile tract of the sperm whale, and is skimmed from the sea as it collects in scummy clouds on the surface. Its smell is at first salty and fecal, but sweetens as it matures. When a perfume ages, the top notes dissolve, and only the guttural, animal notes are left. Hiorns scents fade into the air, the layers of odour stripped back to their visceral beginnings. These works inhabit an ephemeral olfactory dimension, mutating with each inhalation.

The carnal suggestion of these sculptures sits uneasily with their monumental presence. L’instant was displayed in front of a church altar in Belgium. It’s placement there verged on the blasphemous: the explicit sexuality of its sullied surface is incongruous against the white candles and ornate trappings of Christianity. And yet, these pieces do project a kind of majesty. The clasped hands that puncture L’instant’s torso are tender and intimate, a rare presentation of human interaction. The totemic presence of the metal monuments exudes a kind of reverential sexuality. They stand in supplication, like the ex-votos of Catholic tradition, offered at the fulfilment of a vow, or in gratitude or devotion.

The perfumes must be reapplied to keep their scents alive. The act appears arbitrary, necessary, but given the totemic presence of these figures, the repetitive act becomes ritualistic. In the dead hour of the morning, perhaps, or the hush of dusk when the gallery has emptied, an anonymous gallery assistant kneels before the metal figure, re-applying the distilled liquid in breathy clouds of vapour. In Hiorns’ godless temple, material worship is sacred and banal.

“At the site of fatal accidents […] it’s not unusual to see flowers and votives tied to lampposts on highways. It’s a secular movement towards a negation of the transformative and transcendent, towards physical, localised, and earthly. Society has found its need to again build cairns.”[6]

Cairns, both ancient and modern, are absence made concrete. The dried husks of floral offerings, wrapped in soggy paper, lank ribbons fraying in the wind, offer an anonymous glimpse into unfathomable loss. They are the lingering, secular equivalent of a lit candle. Discipline is a cold, clean, angular cairn. The Velcro straps holding the thistles in place are deliberate and human: somebody has put them there. The crystals collect on the thistles like the accumulation of frost, but leave the steel frame untarnished. Their propagation is frozen and localised, deliberate. They are tokens left to a faceless god, in commemoration or supplication.

Left by the same someones, the crystallized offerings of Im winter make the imagination itch. The candied thistles glisten poisonously. They flirt with an explanation, unknown and mesmerizing. Are they being dried? Frozen? Or grown, hung like test tubes on a rack? The paused animacy of their crystal growth is troubling somehow, at once abundant and sterile. Their blue is too blue, glaring like a barren sky. Dead blue. Their downwards suspension, like those in Discipline, evokes roadside tokens left for the dead. Spirituality whispers to the viewer, but the angular sheen of steel is discordant. Science and spirituality overlap in an ambiguous conjugation.

Untitled (2010) is a figurative diptych made from polyurethane, polyester and brain matter. The abnormal marriage of materials is becoming familiar, though far from predictable, and this work presents another combination that verges on desecration. The introduction of organic matter to man-made materials is brave and disturbing. Like the inseminated light bulb, the combination of organic and inorganic materials obscures their distinctions. The diptych’s outline is grotesque and creature-like, like a still from Alien, or the cross section of a corpse, preserved in plastic. But at the same time it has a primitive, sculptural quality. Historically, diptychs were transportable icons, with a hinge that allowed them to be folded down the middle to protect their inscriptions. They were sacred, personal receptacles of faith. In recreating the diptych, Hiorns invests the object with spiritual connotations, but creates a sculpture that is deeply primitive and overtly erotic. The diptych rewrites the conventions of its own form, its unnerving presence quite literally transforming thought.

“I see religion as something we have to grow out of, it’s just holding us back from the next stage of a mental evolution, and in some cases a scientific evolution.”[7]

Hiorns’ work is repeatedly encased in a science fiction vocabulary. The anomalous self-gestation of his glowing crystals is irresistible to such a lexis – and there is definitely something to this. There is something unearthly about those mineral growths: they are extra-terrestrial, but also extra-temporal, also extra-sensual. They are outside of interpretation, or at least outside of an existing interpretation:

“There’s no way of assuming that a way of thinking might exist for the work right now, in the present, so perhaps the works are made for an interpretation that is yet to exist, maybe twenty years in the future, or a hundred years perhaps – but it doesn’t exist now…”[8]

Two of Hiorns’ engine sculptures, The architect’s mother and The architect, ambiguously suggest the coming of this interpretation. The gestation, during and after, of something other. Something strange.

The architect’s mother is halfway there. The mechanical tangle of her parts is still recognisable. Rich mineral sediment rusts her tubes, irrevocably silencing the purr and growl of her chambers. Her top half, unencrusted, is scrap-like and melancholy, the familiar denizen of junkyards and abandoned roadsides. But below the familiar is the unfamiliar. A shimmering blue tideline half engulfs her knotted bulk, investing her sad impotence with anomalous life. These crystals are salt crystals, eliciting a sea-change, half complete.

“Because they were much cheaper, the engines were salvaged from wrecks. They were completely fucked-up once useful things. The problem with the people who had these BMWs was that they didn’t know how much power they had and couldn’t control them.”[9]

The engine’s power is a cultural symptom, neutralized by crystal growth. The very process of crystalisation crystalises the obsoleteness of its object-host. ‘As technology, the engines are transient, near obsolete and already slipping inexorably into the past’.[10] Hiorns makes objects impotent of their contextual purpose, instigating chemical processes of change to trigger cognitive processes of change.

The engine’s crumpled offspring is unidentifiable, a blue something attached to her bulk by a sinuous tube. It lies beneath the line of sulphate, a product of the chemical reaction occurring unseen within the engine’s infested organs.

The birth of the architect displays the gestation of the crystal foetus at a later stage of development, like the exhibition of specimens in an anatomy museum. In this second piece the objects are swallowed entirely by their new materiality. The crystals cannot be removed: they are now part of the object. The engine’s boisterous functionality is obscured by its thorny new skin. The process at work is almost one of fossilisation: minerals and chemicals percolate into the skeletal matter, recrystallizing in its place. The chemical makeup of the object is altered by its submersion, and it becomes something else. The carcass of the engine is replaced by a mineral shell, and its inner texture becomes unfathomable.

Now, lying prostrate on its steel pedestal, the architect is more recognisable as a sibling of Copper Sulphate Chartres & Copper Sulphate Notre-Dame. It lies on its side, like a new-born still sheathed in amniotic fluid. The parallel struts of its cardboard supports are rib-like and brittle. It lies frozen on the cusp of a further transformation, poised to undertake its role as architect of a new world order, a world where science, spirituality and sexuality are indistinguishable from one another, and where the dominant power of objects is rewritten.

Roger Hiorns is not here. From the visceral material of brain matter, to the slips and stains of pungent liquids, his leavings multiply, left behind as tokens of exhausted processes and spent reactions. But also left as a reminder, slippery signposts to a possible rethinking of our relationship with the things that surround us. Hiorns offers a retooling of objects that is primal and fetishistic, but also precise and scientific. The processes of change imposed on objects silence their cultural significance, refocusing the senses towards their materiality: their curves and hollows, surfaces and openings. The works are at times base, and at times strangely transcendental, instigating a return to object worship, to material spirituality divorced from functionality.