Overview:
What connects many sculptures throughout Quinn’s career is their dependency on technology; in particular the use of electricity as a life support system to maintain a perpetual state. While they reflect the fragility inherent in all living forms, their immaculate perfection also evokes its opposite: death and decay. Quinn has likened this notion of being 'plugged in' to a kind of dependency, an analogy for the world being dependent on technology as well as referencing his own personal dependency on alcohol early in his career. He has described the series of Self sculptures, each of which uses ten pints of the artist's own blood as being, “...a work about addiction... the addiction of my life when I was an alcoholic, but also the addiction of society to infrastructure.” This is perhaps most clearly alluded to in the sculpture 12½% Proof, which uses a cast of Quinn's body acting as a fountain of wine inside a steel unit. The unit's glass is controlled by a computer so that it stays opaque except for flashes lasting just 1/60th of a second, when it turns clear, revealing momentarily the figure within. In both Love is All Around You and Beauty, Quinn has used ice which slowly evaporates. In Love is All Around You, he has used full size life casts of himself and his partner embracing, while in Beauty, he uses the figure of Kate Moss dressed in a long cape by the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen. The form of the model, is in a temperature controlled box and gradually dissolves, highlighting how her image, which is seen in the media all around the world, is consumed as a cultural hallucination rather than a true representation of an identity. While the frozen flower sculptures are perhaps the “purest and most magical expression” of a transformation from nature to culture, where the flower becomes an immediate and eternal image of itself, in Reincarnate and Flask they take on more sinister connotations. Both works use flowers placed in a vase cast in frozen human or animal blood and evoke the implicit violence that is present in all the blood sculptures. In Flask, Quinn uses a Nepenthes plant which is carnivorous and an extreme example of what nature can be. On these works, he has commented that “they have some sense of being alive because they live in a condition that could just disappear within a second. They are about the thin line between life and death, I suppose, and the dependence on so many things to maintain that.”