Pig Shop

3 June - 2 July
The Higher Bridges Gallery,
Enniskillen, Co Fermannagh
NEW WORKS

Simon Fennessy Corcoran’s practice look’s at an idea that animals have lost their naturalistic value in the eyes of society, particularly in the “Developed world” as we like to call our selves but outside our sphere of experience there are those who retain this reverence and value we’ve lost. They have a perspective on the world we do not, one which we have grown away from.

Simon took as a starting point, his own ingrained fascination with anatomy and the physical materials, His fascination stems from his own genetic anomaly which as a child fascinated him. A three year project around these issues emerged and formed into an internal discussion about the apparent flippant nature of our shifting viewpoints of “popular” materials. Like anything else things are driven forward by money and industry in today’s society and so to is our landscapes of understanding which change and alter as we develop new viewpoints and new ways of looking and understanding the world around us.

We came from a position of reverence and admiration for animals and through a series cultural and technological expansions this understanding was hybridized with new visions for industry and understanding emerged, entering the international markets shifted these points of view even further onto new materials and cheaper sources of products and away from home grown materials. Simon wants us to take a moment and reconsider where we came from and the crafts and practices we once proscribed to, he finds it fascinating to compose within his work a sudo- scientific notion about the Alchemical moment in which stone turns to gold and value comes into play, could pig shop cause a change in perception which would turn the pig to gold once again?

Pig shop is a method for facilitating this examination and initiating a conversation that brings into question this current state of thinking and the place animals occupy in our social construct, Pig shop is a contradicting humorous evaluation of how we perceive animals in contemporary society and the many different forms they may take, We understand the inevitability that organic material will disintegrate but how to can we preserve their value then.

We place our understanding of how things are on a slow evolution of priorities and industry into the state which we now exist, The notion that pigs represent such a huge source of the Irish diet combined with Limerick City’s history, where Simon is based, which once saw it home to many Pig Factories are the major influence on the methods undertaken in his attempt to sparking a wider conversation and resonate with people in a synoptic approach to creating personal and cultural alterations to how we now perceive things. Simon is questioning the movement of importance and human reverence of animals to something far more monetarily inflated such as gold, and precious metals and the shifting perspectives of value in contemporary society. The use of such materials aims to undercut the hierarchal attitude fostered by industry in how we look at a material and how we determine its value.

We send our cast offs to china where they appreciate the importance and uses of things like pigs heads, the process of creating the work opened his eyes to the process behind working with animals as a material. This project is as much a material exploration as anything else, the fact we sell the parts we don’t wont to other countries which place value in the use off all parts of an animal and then condemn this visions of the world for having used these parts and for using animals which we have formulated in our social structure to be pets and not food.

Its through his interrogation with the moral and social implications of working with animals in art that he finds the most compelling sources of materials which could be viewed as exploitative or seem as an honouring to the animal, its all a matter of perspective and he want you to take a chance at looking at another viewpoint. In returning the focus of this idea of value to animals, and the somewhat undermining material choices which are derived facsimiles of “precious metals” or simulacrums caused unease in how we perceive the work and how this idea of value is imposed on objects of this nature. Simon believes it’s good to think about a subject and evoke the precursors to how things once where every now and then in order to re-examine how we once manipulated the world around us and question the validity of our material perception the ability to place value on anything.

The decline of animals as a revered primal material has been such that we as a society barely noticed it change, Pig shop uses composite simulacrums of these precious metals we now see as the pinnacle of value and usefulness, in a humours subversion, or joke to the idea that we imbue objects of beauty with such high regard and worth yet place such a low value of animals who are intelligent beings we need to survive.

It is the artists business to reveal to mankind a new outlook on life and the world- Dorrit Black

Pig shop opens at The Higher Bridges Gallery on Friday 3 June 2016 at 7-9pm

For further details please contact Arts Office at Fermanagh & Omagh District Council at [email protected] / 0300 303 1777