OTHERWORLD

This body of work encompasses a series of porcelain hybrid sculptures, grafted in an accumulative process, using casts of organs, branches, leaves, antlers, plastics, waste and human debris. Various detritus of human presence transfuse into amalgamations of flora and fauna, blurring boundaries between the artificial and the natural. The material qualities of porcelain—ghostly white and akin to the pale skeletons of bleached coral—speak to something neither fully alive nor dead, but suspended in a state of in-between.

Exploring notions of the ‘cast off’ and excess, these hybrid fusions examine the complex entanglements between production and consumption in contemporary society, and the natural environment.

Downton explores hybridity as a means of re-imagining what it means to be human and redefining how we interrelate with nature—how we perceive its boundaries, and understand its enmeshments with society.

(Words by Lauren Downton, 2023)

Photography by James Field