The Mushrooms

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2022
Media: clay, plaster of Paris, acrylic paint

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These sculptures combine the forms and colours of existing mushroom species with parts of the human body. This series touches on the themes of anthropomorphism and the ‘uncanny valley’ (“a hypothesized relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object, suggesting that humanoid objects that imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of uneasiness and revulsion in observers” (Uncanny valley, 2022)). 

The names of the sculptures are a play on the scientific naming and classification of organisms, using the genus of the mushroom that the sculpture is based on and the Latin word for the body part in place of the species name.