Destructive Mollusc

Curated by Haze, Staffordshire Street, London, 15 September - 2 October 2022

Although a text at the entrance talks about coats, this group show is really all about shells. Shells are hard things that cover soft bodies, and the work of Destructive Mollusc takes place in and around these two complementaries, thanks to curators Haze and the sixteen artists they've invited to participate. They've not neglected the hard interior of Staffordshire Street either, softening and dividing the space with flowing yellow drapes that add a gentle ebb and flow as you move through. 

Some things inside are hard and severe. Carl Anderson's Gauntlet III, a big, glazed stoneware hand, two fingers pointing upwards, stands on a plinth near the entrance like a greeting. It looks like a medieval reliquary, some of which were made in the shape of hands so that, via their enclosed body parts, saints could touch believers from beyond the grave, greying the margin between life and death, body and container. 

Carl Anderson Gauntlet III (2020)

In Gauntlet III the human body and its clothes are in continuity, as a snail is with its shell. The scaley pattern of the armoured glove shows how each finger might curl in on itself to protect the soft thing inside. (The word 'mollusc' itself seems to curl up in this way.) Other sculptures also disrupt corporeal distinctions, as with one unhappy person, legs and arms and head bent so severely that, minus a few gaps, she's formed herself into the shape of a perfect plywood cube.

Saelia Aparicio, Attua (2022)

In this sculpture, Saelia Aparicio's Attua, the human body is thinned out to become a shell. It protects nothing but the vulnerable emptiness inside the box, which the figure, drawn on its faces, upholds with all her rectilinear strength. It would be easy to put your hand into this space, but it would be cruel, like profaning an altar or stamping on a snail.

Mounted on a wall are some metal plaques by Šimon Chovan, in which you can see the path of some creature that's worked its way through the silver in a wiggly brown line. Worms take the cushioning of the earth as their shells, spending their whole lives in them, exploring and regurgitating their own bodies (you could say). Deadpan, hilariously, one of the plaques embeds a small picture of a human city next to the wormholes, as if to remind us that we're not so different, ingesting and excreting gases and sheltering  in our own building-body-worlds. 

Šimon Chovan Metabolic Intuition 1 (2022)

Like a big, undiscovered crustacean, each part of Destructive Mollusc looks different, but together they form an enchanting whole. Participate in its motion, and sometimes you feel like you're walking in the air, sometimes crawling along the ground, sometimes bobbing around under the sea. At points it feels like the show is crawling through you. In any case, it'll leave you squirming (productively) for days.