A Couple of Differences between Thinking and Feeling

Gorillas emerged as a central motif in Fairhurst’s early drawings and cartoons. This strange and poignant coupling – hulking ape and fish out of water – is from a series of bronze sculptures of gorillas in surreal and tragicomic scenarios. It expresses some of the dichotomies at the heart of Fairhurst’s practice – between the cerebral and the emotional (or “thinking and feeling”), and between the sublime and the absurd. The pairing of an ape – man’s closest relative – with a fish, supposedly his most primeval ancestor, produces a dual sense of the familiar and the alien, the close and the faraway.

Year: 2000