The 2008 art work, Seizure, featured an abandoned public housing unit in south-east London, Hiorns dug a hole in smallpox and injected 75000 litres of copper sulfate, followed by weeks of waiting, during which the solution gradually cooled, the crystals gradually formed, Finally the remaining liquid was pumped out and sent to the Chemical recycling center. The result of the chemical action is the sprawling blue crystals in the room, the space magically converted into a blue-light cave, and unlike the sculptures that are generally displayed in the architectural space, the artist turns all the surfaces inside the space into sculptures themselves, thus completely flipping the concept of sculpture.
Hiorns said: "It is a building of compulsion on compulsion, an enactment of a thought which came at a bad time. So there’ s a pathology about that – that a thought coming out of a state of depression can end up as a massive problem, a difficult work … I always think of this piece as a deeply internalised project, a forever growing inwards, an unrelenting, unknowing chemical activity going deeper inwards. It is built around a piece of architecture which has a similar sensibility somehow. " _______ Roger Hiorns in conversation with James Lingwood, July 2008, Artangel.
The crystallization art form of the work reminds me of Shane Waltener's opinion after seeing my work: filling the salt crystals throughout the room, to restore the growth properties of the crystal itself, to show the growth state. Now I still hold doubt, is the crystal can represent what? Or why must it be the shape of a crystal? I hope to find the answer to the crystal meaning by researching Roger Hiorns's work, but also to enlighten me.
“How did you arrive at the idea of working with crystallisation?
It’s a bit like a childhood memory, I can see parts of it more than the whole. A while ago, maybe 10 years, I needed a material to achieve a certain kind of detached activity, and on a basic level an act of transformation, a material which was going to simply transform another material. I felt a system of nature like crystallisation would do.” Roger Hiorns in conversation with James Lingwood, July 2008, Artangel.
According to the artist's statement, he had an object that he wanted to deal with in a particular kind of way. He was thinking about cathedrals at the time, the structure of cathedrals, and of a material that could have some kind of structural relationship to cathedrals.
"I spent a lot of time in a cathedral when I was younger, as a choirboy in Birmingham. Subjected to the awful monotony. Anyway you become embroiled in the architecture, and its central-ness, the focus of attention on the altar. You consider the cathedral is grown from the centre outwards, from an altar outwards, which seems to me how you have a relationship with religion, that you have a central point of focus, that everything relates to. I have to add that central-ness is a Birmingham obsession, in its geographical position, its whole identity based on the centre, the Birmingham cathedral altar seemed as ground-zero to this consideration. " Roger Hiorns in conversation with James Lingwood, July 2008, Artangel.
The crystal starts from the scale level of the molecule, it has its specific set form, from which it cannot move or deviate, unless of course there is impurity introduced. In the environment of the saturate the crystal grows forever outwards. It reproduces itself, it has its own system.
The natural form of the crystal and the process of growth itself is an interesting thing, which has been understood in my previous experiments with salt crystals.
So what does salt crystals stand for me in my work?
When I mentioned salt crystals, the first thing I thought about was a compact state.
So I think salt crystals can represent time, growth, pain, healing (escape: Here refers to no real cure, but through the state of being wrapped to achieve hidden effects).
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