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Slugs

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Slugs are some of Donna Haraway’s  ‘chthonic ones’ (‘beings of the earth, both ancient and up-to-the-minute’)... ‘replete with tentacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and very unruly hair’.  This description was an inspiration and led first to the Slugs and next to Tentacular Thinking.  Haraway is anything but romantic in her view of the ‘critters’ of the earth.

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There is a real relationship built in between human and slug  of taste and survival on the one hand; and distaste, dislike and fury on the other, not to mention frequent Hollywood style murder by poison, drowning or knife crime.  Monster Chetwynd made hers outside Tate Britain rather amiable.

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I made two large soft slugs, built around bolsters.  Reading Timothy Morton and Donna Haraway I thought of the close and uncomfortable relationship between slugs and humans, gardeners in particular. 

They were terrifyingly giant sized and had a tendency to climb walls (like Rachel Whiteread's Mattress.   One elegantly  both ancient and up-to-the-minute,  with a shiny black crumpled back, sparkling trim, silver embroidered ‘eye’ and silk lining beneath knitted silver wire.  The second lower-key: dull yellow fabric covered with woolly fleece with sparkly trim, and patches in metallic threads. Each ironically trailed salt from its tail and each had knobbed horns.  Like Dora Maar's Pere Ubu, or Louise Bourgeois' Spiral Woman', Morton would call them ‘weird’, 'a flicker of a dark pathway between causality and the aesthetic dimension, between doing and appearing.' 

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'           Rachel Whiteread Untitled (Mattress).

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Dora Maar   Pere Ubu

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Louise Bourgeois. Spiral Woman from Cell (detail).

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Monster Chetwynd   Slug

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