Roger Hiorns

Roger Hiorns (born 1975) is a British Contemporary artist who works in London. His primary media is sculpture and installation, using a wide variety of materials, including metals, wood and plastics. He also works in the media of video and photography.

Hiorns was born in Birmingham. He attended the Bournville College of Art from 1991 to 1993, and Goldsmiths, University of London in London from 1993 to 1996. He lives in London.

Hiorns makes work, based around a progressive idea of pushing forward and deviating from the established traditions of sculpture. He proposes new forms alongside the adaptation, re-use and transformation of existing objects.

His approach is both layered and expansive, with the works’ individual elements emerging in a provocatively ambiguous manner. This ambiguity resists a reductionist interpretation, and is not easily described in a linear fashion, the first level of meaning or symbolism that presents itself is not the end point of the work, and the works complexity escapes a fully successful interpretation under the current conditions of understanding. Hiorns represents a generation that has been strongly influenced by conceptual approaches but that is also more engaged in taking a stand against the changing nature of authority and power structures in today’s Euro-American civilization, including the related societal schisms.

Hiorns asks the question, what should the future of object making meaningfully represent, what shape does politics take, and what future can we anticipate in the objects made in the present?

In his work, Hiorns proposes a positive mistrust of our surroundings, the traps inherent within the objects of the world. Hiorns proposes that a way of escaping into the real world, by revealing the true state of things and by breaking through the shell forced on us by society and convention can be enacted upon by the ‘Insulting’ of objects and applied authority.

Detergent foam bubbles produced by compressors; cold sheets of latex rubber alongside BBC programs on medical ethics; pure alcohol burning in cotton wool alongside a naked youth; mechanical parts ground to dust; the brain tissues of animals smeared on fibreglass; semen wiped over the surface of light bulbs, a light filter to claim a territory. He uses materials to affect transformations on found objects, social encounters and urban situations. Fictional scenarios are made real, fire emerges from storm drains, perfume permeates metal surfaces, and crystals colonise industrial objects, naked youths contemplate fire, a clear plastic object becomes the focus of prayer, a boys choir play dead, a proposal to bury a passenger jet plane.

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