Beyond Body: Solo show at Black Swan Arts, Frome

PR Statement

‘I am fascinated by the interconnectedness between the human and the non-human, what passes and what outlasts, as a means of exploring our relationship with impermanence.’  Simon Hitchens

This exhibition sets out to test the boundaries of what it is to be human by investigating the porous relationship we share with the non-human world of rock. British artist Simon Hitchens takes the notion that there is the possibility of a state or being, sentient or otherwise, that is post-human and explores this through a comprehensive body of work which questions differences between animate and inanimate.

By working directly with rock and morphing that with the human body, Hitchens has made a series of hybrid works, uncanny and speculative beings which seek to re-conceive the human. These works become zoomorphic reformations that display strange living qualities, visceral unions between rock and flesh that comprehend the geological world and the flesh world as united. These sculptures, paintings and drawings investigate the essence of things we perceive: the physical, natural world and our place within it.  They seek to understand the sublime qualities of rock: physically as the very earth that supports us and geologically as the almost ageless constant that resonates through time, giving perspective to our transient lives on this planet.  

‘What makes a Being sentient? Is a mountain or stone a Being? What is it to be a thing and can a thing be, without necessarily being human?’