It Came From the Thames

Our wanderings around London sometimes take us to strange places--like today, when our destination was the disused Royal Ear Hospital, an abandoned building that is usually inaccessible behind these blue gates:

In another example of something that regulations would never allow in Vancouver, part of the rundown building is open for three weeks for Richard Sharples's installation, Matters of Life and Death. We entered the building, walked past the security guard, and found ourselves in a large room that was itself in a state of serious decay, surrounded by works made of leaves, ash, and other detritus. Two of the pieces, entitled Hush, consisted of leaves over animatronic forms that moved to the sound of breath. Barely perceptible, we walked past both of them without noticing any movement, and it wasn't until I read the exhibition card at the door that we went back and had a second look, during which we could detect movement in the second sculpture, but still not the first.

Perhaps this was part of the point? With shapes so vaguely human, and movement that you had to crouch down to see, Hush pointed out the degree to which we walk past aspects of society every day, without much thought. The next piece was a blow-up of the artist's fingerprint, filled in with the ash of almost 200 burned photographs.

The large piece of suspended leaves is meant to be a portrait of the artist's 86-year-old mother, highlighting her "monumental and fragile" state.

Perhaps the most visceral piece in the room was this man, built out of rubbish scavenged from the Thames. Even though he is made of mostly inorganic items, something about the lifeless figure seems simultaneously human, as if he were a medical model, with all of the human body's workings exposed.