Performance/Installation
Installation photography Luca Benthos, Snail handler Kit Mead
The chairs each had a snail placed down. Slowly the snails left their slime trails over the chairs’ surface. At the opening of the show, the snails were nowhere to be seen, but visitors were looking for them, having seen them mentioned in the exhibition handout.
What is the symbiosis relationship between audience and work? Mutualism, Commensalism or Parasitism? From a distance, the slime glistened pale and wet, with visitors commenting to gallery workers that it looked like vaginal discharge or semen against the black chairs’ surface.
This work was deployed to play with longing, shame, and expectations, to reinforce the symbiosis between human and non-human presence. It was created during my MA at the Royal College of Art.