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Armoured Eggshells
Each work begins with a shell:
drilled, pierced, reinforced, armed, and made to carry more force than its structure should allow.
The series began with Optic, a chicken egg worked into a form that held delicacy and threat at once. Over time, the shell became a recurring structure: vulnerable, ornamental, damaged and reinforced.
Two decades later, the shell remains a source of fascination. Recent works extend the series into darker territory, using nails, bolts, pins and improvised materials to test how far the shell can be reinforced before it becomes something else.
Fragility is not treated here as weakness. The shell is pierced, loaded and armed until protection and damage become difficult to separate.
The works test the shell as a structure: vulnerable, pierced, reinforced, and made strange by the materials that arm it.
In 2015 I was selected by Selfridges to create an installation for one of the 3.5 metre windows on Oxford Street, London. It became a new body of work made specifically for that site and scale.
Something Wicked This Way Comes was displayed for over two months at Selfridges, including the window, Atrium and Wonder Room. The installation placed the work in a large public setting and brought the series to a much wider audience.
The works below include pieces from the Selfridges installation and later works made from drilled ostrich, rhea, goose and quail eggs, with iron, brass, copper, nails, bolts, pins and paint.
Despite their apparent fragility, many of the works are robust and travel in bespoke boxes. A large group was made in a makeshift studio in India and returned to the UK intact for installation.
SELECTED WORKS
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