Simon Hitchens: Beyond Body

He takes the notion that there is the possibility of a state or being, sentient or otherwise, that is post-human. And explores this through a comprehensive body of work, which questions differences between animate and inanimate.

“I am fascinated by the interconnectedness between the human and the non-human, what passes and what outlasts, as a means of exploring our relationship with impermanence.”

By working directly with rock and morphing that with the human body, Hitchens has made a series of hybrid works. They are uncanny and speculative beings, which seek to re-conceive the human. These works become zoomorphic reformations that display strange living qualities, visceral unions between rock and flesh that comprehend the geological world and the flesh world as united.

His sculptures, paintings and drawings investigate the essence of the things we perceive – the physical, natural world and our place within it. They seek to understand the sublime qualities of rock: physically as the very earth that supports us and geologically as the almost ageless constant that resonates through time, giving perspective to our transient lives on this planet. They ask: what makes a being sentient? Is a mountain or stone a being? What is it to be a thing, and can a thing be without necessarily being human?

Hitchens graduated in Fine Art from the University of the West of England in 1990. He has exhibited widely since graduating, as well as undertaking private commissions and numerous large-scale public commissions. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors (of which he is currently a trustee) in 1998. He is a Royal West of England Academician and is the fourth generation of artists in his family.

• Thursday 19 May, 6.30pm