Roger Hiorns

Roger Hiorns’ Untitled sculpture is a ceramic vessel shaped object hanging from the ceiling, which produces a pilar of foam slowly rising from the top. The foam string creates its own form, growing into an enormous column, then gravity steps in and the foam tumbles to the ground, after which the process starts all over again. Hiorns often uses processes in which he himself has no influence on the eventual appearance of the work. JJ Charlesworth on the self-producing aspect of Hiorns’ objects: “If crystals grow on the body of a BMW engine, as in The birth of the architect (2003), or in the thistles that hang on steel rods of Discipline (2002), or if foam rises from the vessels of Beachy Head (2000-06), they no longer have anything to do with the human intervention that initially set them in motion. Hiorns makes objects that suggest a sort of independence, a separation from the world of those who see them, as if they have a purpose, or at least a story behind their existence, that exists despite the context in which they are encountered. Whether it is sculpted, constructed, assembled, arranged, photographed or painted, much contemporary art still assumes that the artwork should generate a kind of dialogue between it and the spectator. A common trait in Hiorns’ objects is the aspect of mute indifference to the spectator, who can only query, at a distance, the strange concatention of elements before them, and muse on the obscure intent that brought them into being.” (from: JJ Charlesworth, “The New Citizen. On the Work of Roger Hiorns”, in: ”Roger Hiorns, exh. cat. Milton Keynes Gallery, 2006, p. 6)