Marc Quinn | The Overwhelming World of Desire (Paphiopedilum Winston Churchill Hybrid)

Sculpture at Goodwood © 2003

0953779464

£10.00

softcover, 18 pages.

includes:
introduction by Tim Marlow
'natural contrivances' by Dr Phillip Cribb
interview with Marc Quinn

'The Overwhelming World of Desire (Paphiopedilum Winston Churchill Hybrid)' is the tallest sculpture and has the longest title of any created for the Foundation. But it is a work without any of the brashness or bombast often associated with large-scale sculptural installations. It has an hallucinatory quality to it: vivid and seductively colourful from the front and back but almost evaporating into thin air as the viewer walks around it, a simple steel line in space.

The work can be seen and understood in a variety of different contexts, from Darwin's theories of natural and artificial selection, genetic mutation and the phenomenal promiscuity of orchids to the Post-modern idea of sculpture in and as an expanded field of process and information, much of which is discussed in the interview with the artist towards the back of the brochure, together with an illuminating essay by one of the world's leading authorities on orchids, Dr Phillip Cribb. Above all, though, it is a sculpture intended profoundly to seduce the viewer, to "advertise the wonder of life" and to suggest, as Quinn puts it, "the overwhelming sensuality of the natural world whose life force is one of pure desire".