Lard Fountain (2024), kinetic sculpture and performance; dimensions variable.
Debasement, the female body, humiliation, the absurd, medieval torture, slapstick 90s children’s gunging TV games, transgressive transformation, cycles of hell.
The work has been performed twice and documented each time to create Lard Fountain (performance i) and Lard Fountain (performance ii) video pieces which can be exhibited on a screen on part of the sculpture as seen below in the Three Years exhibition in Weston Studio at The Royal Academy.
Lard Fountain is a kinetic, performative sculpture activated by the audience. As a viewer enters the gallery, their movement triggers two heaters positioned on either side of a lard bust—an almost-human, deformed form suspended on a welded metal frame. The heat causes the lard to slowly melt, dripping into a tray that channels the liquid down onto a second sculpture: a cast of my own upper torso, positioned below. The work unfolds slowly, with a sense of inevitability, humiliation, and absurdity.
The structure itself is built from crude, welded steel—reminiscent of medieval stocks or torture devices. I wanted the materials to evoke a language of punishment and control, but the violence here is soft, oozing, and continuous. The piece sits somewhere between ritual and slapstick, high seriousness and low comedy. The melting fat becomes a kind of grotesque anointing, a cycle of degradation that implicates the viewer simply by their presence.
I’ve drawn heavily from imagery of the grotesque and carnivalesque—Bataille’s writing on waste and eroticism, Tom Hyman’s Carnivalesque, and the absurd rituals of abjection seen in Paul McCarthy’s performances. I was thinking too of Buffalmacco’s frescoes in Pisa—the Triumph of Death and Last Judgement—where sinners are locked in endless cycles of punishment. I’m interested in that endlessness, that looping of humiliation into transformation.
There are echoes of 90s children’s TV shows in this as well—where participants were publicly “gunged” for entertainment. This shared cultural memory of slapstick humiliation feels important. I wanted to merge that with the sacred and the scatological, the holy and the profane; to watch something collapse under its own absurdity.
Artworks in gallery:
Lard Fountain (2024) video on metal stand with electric heater from Three Years exhibition in Weston Studio at The Royal Academy.
Stills from Lard Fountain (performance i) and Lard Fountain (performance ii)
Three Years was curated by artist and Senior Lecturer, Margarita Gluzberg - who at points between 2021 and 2024 has been in dialogue with all the participants of this exhibition.
Lolly Adams, Mohammed Adel, Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell, Dwayne Coleman, Katrina Cowling, Joshua Fay, Vitaliia Fedorova, Georgia Kerr, Djofray Makumbu, Francisca Pinto, Zachariah Riley Suleman Aqeel Khilji, Bishwadhan Rai, Alex Margo Arden, Rosa Klerkx, Esther Gamsu, Charlotte Winifred Guérard, Robert O’Leary, Rahima Gambo, James Sibley, Gusty Ferro, Fleur Dempsey, Ilze Aulmane, Massimiliano Gottardi, Racheal Crowther, Jame St Findlay, Norberto Spina, Fungai Benhura, Lizzie Munn, Kevin Brennan, Tanoa Sasraku, Fischer Mustin
