Angus Fairhurst
Angus Fairhurst (4 October 1966 – 29 March 2008) was an English artist working in installation, photography and video. He was one of the Young British Artists (YBAs).
The Birth of Consistency
The Birth of Consistency (2004) shows a gorilla – one of the recurring motifs of Fairhurst’s work – contemplating itself in a mirrored pool and wrenching the reflective surface towards itself. It is one of a series of works in bronze from the mid-2000s depicting gorillas in a variety of surreal scenarios. Modelled from clay and cast on miniature or life-size scales, Fairhurst’s gorillas were the sculptural successors to his anthropomorphic drawings of the 1990s (he once remarked that he “wanted to make a classical sculpture which has the lightness of a cartoon”). Each shows the gorilla in an absurdist and doleful scenario – for instance contemplating its own detached arm, or holding its detached head aloft. Here, the artist alludes to the classical myth of Narcissus, casting the gorilla in the role of the doomed boy who fell in love with his reflection. The title refers to the stage at which the human brain becomes capable of conceptualising visual representations – famously theorised by Jacques Lacan as le stade du miroir or the ‘mirror stage’. The gorilla is confronting its own image, but also perhaps apprehending its own status as an artwork and a construct. Indeed, the work wears its artifice openly; there is a an air of theatricality about the manoeuvrable pond and the uniformly black patina of the gorilla, ponds and rushes. Here and in many works, Fairhurst constructed a kind of ‘fake nature’ – a celebration of the pastoral and mythological realms that also affectionately pricked their artifice.
http://www.sadiecoles.com/exhibitions-press-release/angus-fairhurst-frieze-2014
Michelle Wright, Fine Artist 
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