Overview:
Made immediately after The Complete Marbles - sculptures of people with disabilities, culminating with Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005) in Trafalgar Square - these sculptures deal with the opposite - the idealised unreal image of the idolised body. These works all depict the fashion model Kate Moss who became a media icon for our age. Presented in contorted yoga poses, the works explore the idea of Moss as an abstraction, an idealised figure who is more of a cultural hallucination than an actual person of flesh and blood. The culmination of this series is Siren (2008), a cast of Quinn’s sculpture Sphinx (2005), in solid 18 carat gold. Quinn says of the works, "Human beings often create images, begin to worship them and then forget the images were initially invented by them. They are left with an abstract image that is impossible to measure up to. This is the basis of all celebrity and religious imagery. Gold is a metal that humans have decided is one of the most valuable materials in the world, but like their invented images of perfection, gold itself is a belief system - inherently no more valuable than any other metal. By casting Sphinx in gold, Siren creates an image of all the impossible dreams that lure people to wreck their lives on the rocky shore of reality - the ultimate hallucination which drives humans to madness." When this sculpture was shown in the British Museum in 2008 alongside its classical antecedents, it also coincided with the beginning of the global financial crisis, thus further emphasising the fragility of all these belief systems. In The Road to Enlightenment, Moss is depicted as an emaciated figure. This work is based on a Buddhist sculpture that is approximately 2,000 years old, which relates to a moment of enlightenment and the birth of Buddhist philosophy. The work also makes reference to eating disorders which can arise from the pursuit of impossible perfection; and remind us that we can become controlled by the images and fantasies that we collectively create.
