Roger Hiorns
SEIZURE
3 September – 2 November 2008
A Jerwood/Artangel Commission
Harper Road, London SE1
British artist Roger Hiorns makes works with detergent, disinfectant, perfume, fire and copper sulphate crystals. He uses these materials to effect surprising, physical and aesthetic transformations on found objects.
In SEIZURE – Hiorns’ most ambitious large-scale work to date – he precipitates an unexpected sculptural form within the fabric of a late-modernist social housing estate near London Bridge.
Hiorns uses crystallisation as an unpredictable process informed by the way that the crystals grow under specific circumstances. He has applied this process to objects reminiscent of the rational structures of human knowledge, creative control and industrial power transforming steel poles, car engines and cardboard architectural models into crystalline forms.
Architecture and modernist sculpture continue to be important touchstones for Hiorns’ work, and both have strongly informed the development of this major new commission. For his first work within an urban site Hiorns’ work makes a radical shift of scale and context, and promises the development of an extraordinary chemical intervention into the heart of the city.
SEIZURE follows on in Artangel’s long tradition of transforming urban housing into large-scale immersive works of art.
Roger Hiorns’ SEIZURE is commissioned by Artangel and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, in association with Channel 4. The work was selected through the Jerwood/Artangel Open, a new commissioning initiative for the arts, which was launched in the summer of 2006 in association with Channel 4 and Arts Council England.
