Marc Quinn

Description

'The Overwhelming World of Desire (Paphiopedilum Winston Churchill Hybrid)' is the tallest sculpture and has the longest title of any created for Goodwood. 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 evolution of the work has something of the hybrid nature of the orchid species from which it is drawn. It stems most obviously and immediately from a small steel orchid which Marc Quinn showed in the Thinking Big exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice in 2002. That sculpture, barely seventy eight centimetres in height, was created using a combination of laser drawing and photography and became the model for the monster orchid, some twelve metres tall, which now dominates the landscape of Hat Hill. But the idea and processes involved in realising 'The Overwhelming World of Desire (Paphiopedilum Winston Churchill Hybrid)' evolved through a series of works which Quinn began in Milan, at the Prada Foundation in 2000, made from freezing real flowers. These perfect preservations of dead flora acknowledged the transience of nature but seemed to halt the natural life cycle itself. Subsequently, Quinn took photographs of his small frozen gardens and used a pigment printing process which, because it doesn't fade in the way that photographic dye does, extended the life of the image in a way which paralleled that of the freezing process.

The development of these works has enabled Quinn, working together with the artist Adam Lowe and the engineer Neil Thomas, to create an extraordinary and monumental structure that is both an object and image; a real tangible thing in itself and the representation of something many times smaller in scale. It will be resistant to many, if not quite all, of the elemental forces of nature. The colour of the work will have something of the permanence of the steel on which it is glued. Its smooth surface is coated with numerous layers of resin which will protect the work from the effects of sunlight and rain.

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 Postmodern idea of sculpture in and as an expanded field of process and information. 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'.