Tentacular Thinking

I watched on video an octopus (red and slithery, not at all woolly) sliding in and out of a boat hatch and was aware of the potential for humour. Octopi are so often cartoon characters!

Consistent advice to me has been to embody my idea, not to illustrate it and, while at first I hardly understood the difference, I made efforts to learn. Fine Art and activism art need to be either untangled or made to work as an alliance. This is important to me. Suzanne Lacy, Ackroyd and Harvey and Culture Declares Emergency provide models (see Making Art as if the Earth Matters).

When I first experienced the fleece material I tried rolling it up and making an installation. Edwina Ashton has done the same but added quirky creatures. I tried something similar, piled it up, stitched it with gold thread, made Robert Gober style objects sticking out of electric sockets. At that stage I had a mountain of the material and no real plan.

Embodiment remained a mystery. Tentacular Thinking began as just a plain octopus made of woollen fleece with pan scrub suckers. I imagined fattening it up and matching it with a couple of rusty oil drums. Seminar comments led to a bigger lightbulb moment when I understood that the sort of diorama I imagined was still aiming in the direction of decoration/illustration.

Installation view

Details

Robert Gober The Heart is not a Metaphor.

There is a kind of bitter sweet humour to Tentacular Thinking. The contrast between its fabric and the scaly, slimy, slithery sensations implied by an octopus is clear. The rather pompous title adds to the humour. It has similarities with Louise Bourgeois' Seven in a Bed. Both are sewn and stuffed in soft fabric, embodying chaotic bundles - one apparently of humanity, the other of tentacles. Bourgeois' spiders - eight limbed creature too are also a bit scary, exciting, laughable.

Hope Hippo by Allora and Calzadilla has a similar sense to Tentacular Thinking of being dumped, immobilised, and eying the world with some cynicism. The hippo is made of a very basic natural material - earth itself, and so has a direct relevance to the environmental issues I am hoping to identify.

Edwina Ashton Why we got so fat

Louise Bourgeois Seven in a Bed

Louise Bourgeois Spider

Allora and Calzadilla Hope Hippo