I cut my skin to liberate the splinter: Please remember on my behalf

2017, Kemang Wa Lehulere

This is one element of a large-scale multi-part work that comprises six sculptural installations – I cut my skin to liberate the splinter Act 1–5 and I cut my skin to liberate the splinter: Please remember on my behalf, all 2017 (Tate T15274–T15279). They can be shown individually or together as a single work, as they were on their initial presentation during Performa 17 Biennial in New York in November 2017, which earned the artist the fourth Malcolm McLaren Award.

Moose

1998, Laura Ford

Moose is one of a series of sculptures of animals made by Ford in the late 1990s. Some of these sculptures, like Moose, are over life-size representations of four-legged animals. Others, like Elephant Boy (1998), are child-sized anthropomorphic hybrids which look like children costumed as animals. Ford grew up on a fairground and then on an old farm, which had previously been a zoo, in Cardiff. She remembers lots of animal stories from this time. More recently she has made many visits to London Zoo with her two small children. She thinks of her animal sculptures as 'sculptures dressed up as animals which are dressed up as people' (unpublished conversation with the author, 23 March 2000). Covered in fabrics, the sculptures have a deceptively soft, stuffed appearance. They are in fact extremely hard. Ford makes an armature out of a combination of scaffolding poles, chicken wire and plaster, which she covers with fabric, sometimes using wadding to enhance the forms. Several layers of fabric suggest garments. The layer of grey blanket covering the body of Moose ends at the tops of its legs, evoking human qualities. Ford is interested in ambiguities in the dynamics of looking, which involve pleasure as well as possible threat and fear of invasion. In the early 1990s she made several works which suggest a complicity in looking between the viewer and the subject being looked at. It is significant that her animal sculptures are all blind; fabric covers their faces and features are largely absent. Ford believes that this allows the viewer to look at them. She has said 'without the eyes and without the face … somehow they have the possibility of being real to me … they're more alive being smothered somehow' (unpublished conversation with the author, 23 March 2000). The sculptures represent emotional states with a wide range of ambiguities. The fabrics suggest softness, cosiness and domesticity. The felt-like blanket covering Moose recalls the work of the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-86), for whom felt was an important material symbolising protection and insulation. The sculpture's lack of eyes gives it an introverted quality, which for the artist is connected to a sense of being trapped, albeit willingly, in domestic situations. Moose combines gentleness and comfort with an uncanny blankness, providing a vehicle for the projection of the viewer's imagination. Further reading:A Stranger Here Myself: Laura Ford and Jacqueline Poncelet, exhibition catalogue, Camden Arts Centre, 1998, reproduced (colour) [p.22]New Art from Britain, exhibition catalogue, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Innsbruck 1998, pp.20-3British Art Show 5, exhibition catalogue, National Touring Exhibitions, 2000, pp.56-7 Elizabeth Manchester April 2001

Dog

1952, Francis Bacon

Throughout his career, Francis Bacon included animals in his paintings to represent the wildness of human emotion. Here, Bacon viscerally smears paint to suggest a snarling dog, evoking aggression, vulnerability or both. The image comes from Eadweard Muybridge's 1887 time-lapse photographs of animals in motion. Bacon isolates the dog, placing it in an ambiguous setting based on the sea front in Monte Carlo, where he lived from 1946 to 1950.

Gallery label, August 2024

Crazy Bat Lady

2018, Monster Chetwynd

This is a large-scale self-portrait of the artist. It is based on a photograph taken by the artist’s mother. The original image has been manipulated using photocopies and collage, giving the face a mask-like appearance. A bat and a butterfly form the hair or an extravagant hat. The work reflects Chetwynd’s interest in staging and performance and presents a wry take on female stereotypes.

Gallery label, May 2019

Tatlin’s Whisper #5

2008, Tania Bruguera

Tatlin’s Whisper #5 is a performance work by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. During the performance, two mounted policemen in uniform (one on a white horse and one on a black horse) are brought into the museum or exhibition space. They patrol the space, guiding and controlling the audience by using a minimum of six crowd control techniques. These include actions such as closing off the gallery entrance or entrances, pushing the audience forward with lateral movements of the horses, manipulating the audience into a single group and encircling it to tighten the group, frontal confrontation with the horse, and breaking up the audience into two distinct groups.

Ocelot Head

1968, Axel Amuchastegui

Lorry Art

2010, Rose Wylie OBE

Lobster Telephone

1938, Salvador Dalí

Lobster Telephone is an unexpected combination of objects. Dalí believed bringing them together could reveal secret desires. For him, both lobsters and telephones were connected with sex. This work is a classic example of a surrealist object. The surrealists promoted the idea that art could reflect the mysteries of the unconscious mind.

Gallery label, August 2020

Catfish Envy

1993, Masami Teraoka

Japanese-born Masami Teraoka combines the influences of traditional Japanese art forms and American Pop art, exploiting the cultural and temporal disparities between the traditional style and the contemporary issues and ideas which form his subject matter. After training with traditional Japanese masters, Teraoka moved to Los Angeles to study Western art in 1961. From the 1970s, he began painting watercolours, and later prints, which mimicked the appearance of ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints of the Edo Period (1615-1868). In these works, he creates scenes using characters from Kabuki theatre, geisha and samurai, recreating the characteristic dramatic landscapes of the prints, and incorporating cartouches and calligraphy. Teraoka draws on an affinity between these ‘floating world’ prints, which were mass-produced for an emerging bourgeois market, and the work of the Pop artists, who celebrated mass-production and low forms of culture.

Photograph of zebras at a zoo

[1930s], Eileen Agar

Bird in Hand

2006, Ellen Gallagher

Sheets of inked and stained pages have been stacked together and densely layered, sometimes twenty sheets deep, the edges and surface cut with a knife to reveal colour striation beneath. The undersea landscape is related to Gallagher’s imaginative exploration of the Middle Passage, the most treacherous part of the slave trading route between Africa and North America. The central figure is a black sailor or pirate with a peg leg. ‘I think of this painting as an origin myth of sorts, with a kind of evil doctor, perhaps related to Doctor Moreau or Frankenstein, at its centre’, Gallagher has said.

Gallery label, September 2008

Cage, cage, cage

1966 (repaired 2009), Parviz Tanavoli

This work was made after Tanavoli returned to Iran from America, where he was greatly inspired by pop art. The bird inside or outside the cage can be interpreted in various ways, as a political metaphor or a literal representation of the Iranian custom of placing birds in small cages throughout bazaars, creating a pleasant atmosphere in a hectic market place. Tanavoli’s work explores mass consumer culture in the specific context of Iran, something that other artists in the country had not previously addressed.

Gallery label, February 2016

You were always on my mind

2007, Wangechi Mutu

Mutu’s elaborate figurative paintings incorporate collaged materials from a variety of sources including medical journals, ethnographic photo-essays, fashion, wildlife and pornographic magazines. In this double profile, the larger, lower, head is mainly in earth tones, and includes collaged images of a begging figure and a jewelled hand. The smaller head is lushly coloured and partly built-up in layers of a moss-like plant substance. The entire construction suggests a conflation between natural and artificial constructions of beauty and plenty.

Gallery label, September 2008

The Restless Image: a discrepancy between the seen position and the felt position

1975, Rose Finn-Kelcey

This photograph was inspired by a snapshot of Rose Finn-Kelcey’s mother. The artist revisited a beach near Dungeness, Kent, where her family had gone when she was a child. There she took photographs of herself performing handstands. This image appears to capture an exuberant, impulsive gesture. But the work’s subtitle suggests the difference between the experience and what is visible to the spectator. The artist’s later work continued to explore the inconsistency between inner life and external perception.

Gallery label, September 2023

Cocon du Vide

2000, Chen Zhen

Chen Zhen lived and worked mainly between Shanghai, New York and Paris, and his work reflects this constant shifting between cultures, which the artist called ‘transexperience’. In his sculptures and installations he typically assembled obsolete everyday objects, particularly old furniture and candles, sometimes in combination with fragments of technology and consumer goods. This work belongs to a series of sculptures made between 1999 and 2000, sharing the title Cocon du Vide (‘empty cocoon’) and featuring chrysalis-like forms made from Chinese abacus and Buddhist rosary beads threaded onto metal frames.

Gallery label, June 2013

Sphinx

1959, Kim Lim

The title of this work speaks of Kim Lim’s love of ancient artefacts. It evokes a mythical hybrid creature, with the head of a human and the body of a lion. While still a student, Lim began to salvage, carve and assemble off-cuts she found in wood yards. This allowed her to create art from building blocks which already had forms and histories. She then combined them into bold and playful configurations. Here, Lim scorched the surface of the wood so different sections would have distinctive textures and reflect the light differently

Gallery label, September 2023

Roger & Steve, London

1984, printed 2018, Sunil Gupta

This series of black and white portraits features gay and lesbian couples from Sunil Gupta’s social circles in London and Newcastle. Called Lovers: Ten Years On, the project was shot over a period of two years from 1984–6, following the end of Gupta’s own ten-year relationship. Reminiscent of traditional family portraits, the photographs show couples in affectionate poses in their own living spaces. Prejudicial coverage of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in the 1980s threatened to turn public opinion against the acceptance of queer relationships, which were portrayed as ‘sexually deviant’. In contrast to these offensive depictions of queer love, the people in Lovers: Ten Years On are often presented as quite ordinary, middle-class, professional couples. Many of the people photographed would later lose their lives to HIV and AIDS.

Gallery label, January 2025

Freedom and Change

1984, Lubaina Himid CBE RA

Lubaina Himid’s large installation is a celebration of relationships between women. Two Black women run barefoot along a beach, holding their hands high in the air as if about to twirl joyfully. Appearing to trample two white men trapped in the sand, they run towards the future, holding the leads of a pack of snarling dogs. Himid wrote about this work: ‘Made on a “theatre curtain”, it precedes the drama and romance of running away ... without depicting the reality of running away or the consciousness of a sudden departure on those left behind.’

Gallery label, August 2020

Memory

2012, Daido Moriyama

Painting of a spectacled owl

1977, Aubrey Williams

Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck at Trafalgar Square, London

1966, printed 2010, James Barnor

This is one of a group of black and white and colour photographs in Tate’s collection taken by James Barnor in the 1960s (Tate P13419–P13421, P13484, P14381–P14384). Barnor’s portraiture played a key role in documenting black women and men who, in the post-war period, had immigrated to Britain from African countries and were establishing their identity as British. His photographs include images of unnamed subjects, such the two smartly-dressed women in Wedding Guests, London 1960s who pose in front of one of the classic British telephone boxes designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, presumably on their way to a wedding. Other portraits feature public figures, such as the radio journalist Mike Eghan, host of a popular Ghanaian talk show aired on the BBC (Mike Eghan at BBC Studios, London 1967 and Mike Eghan at Piccadilly Circus, London 1967). One image documents the visit of American boxing legend Muhammad Ali to London in 1966, showing Ali training in advance of a fight (Muhammad Ali Training, Earl’s Court, London 1966). A number of shots feature portraits of ‘cover girls’ that were originally published as covers for the magazine Drum, a publication originally from South Africa (Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck at Trafalgar Square, London 1966, Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck, London 1966). In Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck at Trafalgar Square, London the model poses at one of London’s most iconic sites; in Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck, London she stands in a London street, leaning against a car. These photographs capture the mood and fashion of London’s ‘swinging Sixties’, as well as the aspiration of Black immigrants to integrate into British society.

Quarta-Feira de Cinzas / Epilogue

2006, Rivane Neuenschwander, Cao Guimarães

Quarta-Feira de Cinzas / Epilogue 2006 is a single channel video lasting 5 minutes and 48 seconds and shown on a loop. It features a ground-level, close-up view of red and black ants carrying coloured confetti across the floor of the Brazilian rainforest. The film starts with one ant carrying a piece of gold confetti over a gritty surface, followed by shots of differently sized ants attempting to grip or drag confetti across soil and tree trunks. As the video progresses it begins to show multiple ants per scene: a pair collaborate to move a disc up a small hill, and a group fights over a piece of silver confetti. The vegetation surrounding the insects becomes denser and the shots show increasing numbers of ants and confetti pieces, the brightly coloured, often reflective discs contrasting with the earthy tones of the rainforest. The video concludes with a multitude of ants carrying their confetti into a dark crevice in the soil. The film’s soundtrack combines ambient noises, such as bird calls, leaves rustling and cars passing, with the rhythmic sound of matchsticks hitting the ground. The latter are intermittent at first, becoming more constant during the film’s second half. The work is displayed in a 5 x 7 or 6 x 8 metre room with black walls and a dark grey carpet, and projected onto the wall at a width of 3–4 metres. The projection area is covered with reflective white paint and positioned at a height that corresponds roughly to the eye level of the seated viewer (see ‘Specifications for the Room’, instructions from Galeria Fortes Vilaça to Tate, 4 April 2007, Tate Conservation File).

Grain Weevil

2000, Yinka Shonibare CBE

Yinka Shonibare's arabesque lithograph, Grain Weevil, depicts a beetle that damages stored grain by boring into it in order to deposit its eggs. A glossy beetle is silhouetted against a matt orange background which is criss-crossed by curving black lines. The white spots that spread over the surface of the print are suggestive of both contamination and insect eggs. Shonibare's print is one of a portfolio of ten prints collectively entitled Bugs. The portfolio was published by the Byam Shaw School of Art in London. Produced as a fundraiser, the proceeds from the portfolio sales were dedicated to providing bursaries to support Byam Shaw students from overseas, particularly those from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and India. The works in the portfolio use various printmaking processes and share an insect theme which has been interpreted in diverse ways. The theme was set by the school principal, Alister Warman. Originally intended to refer specifically to insects found in London, it was conceived of as a sequel to another print portfolio published by the school in 1994, Nine London Birds. The decorative treatment deployed by a number of the artists involved contrasts with a subject matter commonly regarded as repugnant. Similarly, Mark Wallinger's King Edward and the Colorado Beetle refers to crop destruction. The Colorado beetle of the title is a small, yellow American beetle whose larva is exceedingly destructive to the potato. Wallinger's potato print uses as its medium the potential victim of the insect. The image of the beetle is repeated five times on the print, with the strongest print at the centre surrounded by increasingly weaker prints. The arrangement of the beetles suggests that these five represent only a tiny section of an endlessly repeating pattern, hinting at the overwhelmingly profuse aspect of the insect world. In Fiona Banner's etching, Swarm, an amorphous cloud of impenetrable blackness hovers against a white background. It is like a black hole teeming with insects. The print eloquently conveys the unquantifiable and unbounded nature of the insect realm. Anya Gallaccio's contribution, a silver gelatin print entitled Spider's Leg at 400x, invokes the spirit of scientific enquiry. Reminiscent of how often a child's first encounter with a microscope prompts a search for dead insects to magnify, Gallaccio's print presents an unsettlingly close-up view of a spider's leg. Small hairs metamorphose into an otherworldly, densely forested landscape. Other prints focus on the uneasy relationship between insects and humans. Peter Doig's etching, Kings Cross Mosquito, is an image of night-time menace. Under the cover of darkness, a mosquito perches on a hairy section of exposed skin. The mosquito's belly is a deep blood red, suggesting that it has already gorged on the available flesh. Kathy Prendergast's Mittens and Moth Eggs invokes the discreet, noiseless destruction of a bug infestation. A pair of knitted gloves has been eaten by moths and shows signs of disintegration. In Tacita Dean's Wasp, a reviled insect is granted a formal grace. It is photographed on a car windscreen among the raindrops which are beyond the reach of the wipers. The bright lights of the road are blurred by the droplets into brilliant pools of light. Amid this dazzling light, the wasp glows like a small piece of amber. In Cornelia Parker's The Spider that Died in the Tower of London, the creature is magnified to fill the frame of the print. Set against a pale blue background, we are confronted with the remains of a spider which, if attended to at all, would ordinarily be swept up and disposed of without ceremony. This is consistent with Parker's familiar strategy of evoking the hidden stories of overlooked objects, thus transforming their status. Brad Lochore's print, Night Moth, presents the orange glow of a household lamp giving way to darkness on all sides. The shapes conjured by the contrast of light and shadow suggest the outline of fluttering wings. Finally, Gavin Turk's lithograph, Metamorphosis, is accompanied by a short text: 'As he awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed into a gigantic insect.' Quoting Kafka, Turk presents a comically anthropomorphized insect, standing upright on two legs, with arms poised as if about to reach for a pair of pistols in a bizarre insectoid shoot-out. This boxed portfolio of prints exists in an edition of ninety, of which this is number twenty-one. It is presented in a portfolio box with title page and colophon. Further reading:Yinka Shonibare, exhibition catalogue, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 1999. Helen DelaneyJanuary 2002