http://www.boatinternational.com | February 2016M
arc Quinn is standing by a
half-finished, pink and silver
spray-painted, aluminium-backed
work in his Hoxton studio in the East End
of London, eloquently explaining the creative
process behind his recent show The Toxic
Sublime at White Cube. The British artist, who
came to prominence in the 1990s with Self,
a sculpture made with his own blood, and
Alison Lapper Pregnant, the beautiful,
controversial sculpture of a disabled woman
for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, has
a new subject between his teeth, human beings’
complex relationship with their environment.
This recent work is made up of two halves:
The Toxic Sublime hybrid painting/sculptures
and the stainless steel sculptures, Frozen Waves
and Broken Sublime, all of which have their
origins in the Caribbean, where Quinn has
a house. “I spend three months a year looking
at the ocean,” he says. “It is the blood of the
planet.” But, typically, he was not going to comeMARC QUINN’S
SEA-INSPIRED ART:
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# marc-quinnForce of nature
Marc Quinn’s work celebrates the ocean, even when it’s
in “captivity” in our cities. Ticky Hedley-Dentreports
back with a traditional seascape; as he points
out, one can’t be Turner in the age of global
warming. “These paintings are viewed from
an urban perspective. They are paintings of
the sea by someone who lives in the city. I think
you need the tension between the two.”
All of The Toxic Sublime paintings have
the same generic Caribbean sunset as their
base. “I spray paint it, which is obviously an
urban paint, and start by layering it. Once I’ve
done that I sand it down. Then I spray through
bits of flotsam and jetsam, bits of shit that
come of boats. I spray through it so you get a
ghost image of the stuf.” All this is done over
crumpled plastic to give it a distressed finish.
“Then I take it on to the street and get all the
textures of manhole covers, which is basically
water in captivity, water controlled by man, but
ultimately connected to the ocean.”
Next, Quinn puts on some steel-toe-capped
boots and gets physical: “I have to kick them
to shape the aluminium.” The result is a verythree-dimensional painting. “You’ve got a
painting that is a painting of the sublime. It’s
a new sublime, it’s not the one of pure nature,
it’s man-shaped nature,” says the softly spoken
Quinn, who has an intellectual approach to his
work, every idea meticulously thought out.
To complement the paintings, Quinn made
the stainless steel Frozen Waves and Broken
Sublime sculptures. “The wave sculptures
are the opposite in a way. The paintings are
man-made things, while the wave sculptures
are about the power of the ocean. They are
something much older and prehistoric. They
are about a primordial power.”
Quinn became a beachcomber to find the
perfect shell fragments, because he needed
ones that could stand up on their own as he
copied their forms for the sculptures. “I was
walking along the beach and I looked at it and
thought it was interesting – it’s like a sculpture
of a wave by the action of the wave. It’s an
unwitting self-portrait of the ocean, in a way.”
These stunning sculptures look like
molten metal and are shiny on the front
and rough on the back, just like a sea-worn
shell. “The front is something you could dive
through and go to another dimension,” jokes
Quinn. To make these he used a 3D printer,
the polystyrene printouts are put together
and sent to the foundry where they are made
with metal; moulded, polished and brushed.
The large sculptures take more than a year
to make and are highly polished to get the
wondrous finish that was shown of so well
when they were recently displayed in the
courtyard of Somerset House in central
London, where the blue sky and surrounding
architecture were reflected in them.
Quinn continues to explore the environment
and our relationship with it, and is working
on some paintings using bits of coral and sea
debris. Although his work is so diverse, Quinn
identifies a theme of fragility running through
it. “You could say the earlier flower sculptures,
which are sculptures of flowers painted with
car paint, is a precursor to these ones.”
Of course Quinn will always be famous
for his more controversial works such as