Unnatural* Urges

“Desire occupies or designates the place of the interval. A permanent definition of desire would put an end to desire.” (Irigaray, 1993) (1)

I’m watching a fat aphid (2) crawl between the midge bites on my arm, while I sit surrounded by various plants and insects among the art of Laura Lulika, Hang Linton, Jack Murphy & Clay AD in the Queens Park Glasshouse. This exhibition, entitled Unnatural* Urges and produced by the artists with curatorial support by Zoë Tumika for Glasgow International 2024 speaks to ‘desire’ in all the unstable, plural and resistant meanings of that term. It's about desire that is never isolated in one entity alone, but rather spills out with something like chemical markers that trigger new desires in others.

The exhibition includes sculptural work from three artists and a sound piece from the fourth. While these are recognisable as individual voices, their position amongst the plants and the humid gurgling atmosphere of the Glasshouse draws me to address them as one syntrophic grouping, like the contents of a gut, or the space under a log (3). As with an intestine or a forest floor, consumption and production oscillate through Unnatural* Urges. I’m here close to the end of the show's life and some elements have all but rotted to become food for other organisms. Gause hangs from a heart shape frame, its stains and garlands of mussel shells emphasises that the gap between putrescence and nourishment is primarily linguistic. Blobs of spoiled jelly sit in soil, all previous definition blown out like corpses in a field left too long before being found. I watch an ant march up to one and then disappear back into the foliage around it. A little further away a contrastingly pristine cannula tube is plugged into some organic material that has all but petrified, leaving a dried tar-black resiny lump that might have once been an organ.

Looking over the exhibition space are wooden tablets covered in carved words, diagrams, and holes, and slung with bells and bottles. The language of these is somewhere between votive offerings at a clootie tree and labour slogans, both forward looking expressions of desire rearticulated through a third, the arborglyph. Elsewhere groups of green ceramic organisms cluster around more tubes or sit on beautifully printed fabric. These are labelled as “pickles” but their wide joker’s grins make me think this might be a trick. They remind me of algae under a microscope, via the omnivorous libido of Vaughn Bodē. Over the sound of water dripping somewhere behind me a voice on the soundtrack whispers “tears plummet into muddy earth to grow fresh girly salads” and I briefly feel sick.

Pulling back to the macro view, it's noticeable that all the works in the show are themselves multiple, both in the sense that they are presented as a series, and in the sense that these are themselves made from multiple parts which are repeated, though invariably with variation. Constellations of bells, decomposing blobs, and pickles run rhythmically through the artworks. Nowhere is the microbial structure more evident than in the exhibition's soundtrack. This 45 minute long piece consists of a number of movements, each featuring degrading looped samples and mutating refrains.

It is through these serieses that are broken, scattered, and layered like leaf litter around the Glasshouse’s plants that desire comes to the foreground. In the soil beneath a perfect Bay Tree’s perfectly braided stems peeks a ceramic creature, a bone sticking out of its mouth and its nakedness highlighted by the workboots it wears. When I spot this green figure it coincides with a shift on the audio work that plays throughout the show.

A choral crescendo rises through slowly oscillating synthesiser tones only to be met and broken by a chopped loop of a person laughing and sighing. Following the gaze of the figure behind the Bay I see a wedge of tree trunk, angled up like a smile and engraved with one word “Everyone”. Across the Glasshouse like a half rhyme is another piece of wood of almost the same size. This one however is ply, its shape slightly more like an upturned knife blade and reads “everything borrowed”.

Within the sweaty interior of the Glasshouse the deviating repetitions and overlapping dispersal of the artworks contrasts with the highly manicured plants, each in their own pot, each reaching for a standardised ornamental form. The artworks of Unnatural* Urges reject any pretence of uniformity and repetition is deployed as an opportunity for more variance. Just as the layered presentation encourages the viewer to be part of that process of accident and departure. I find this immensely reassuring, while at the same time it has made the exhibition somewhat difficult to write about. By this I mean the responses elicited that I feel the most, that I think are the most important, and the ones impossible to articulate. These are the affective responses that half form from the overlap between an engraved phrase and a recognised material, and dissolve under a nauseating filter sweep coinciding with the expression on a ceramic creature. The point is then that they don’t need to be articulated, only experienced. Again, this holds a stark contrast with the ornamental garden where plants show the signs of years of labour not only to ensure health, but in order to follow singular lines of desire towards ideal language. This Bay Tree’s stems are braided, just as the other Bay Trees' stems are braided. The individual path of a plant reaching toward light reshaped to an aesthetic standard set long ago.

Unnatural* Urges reframes the regulated Edwardian sensibilities of the Queens Park Glasshouse, pulling sensuality and care out of its ornamental orderliness. It's this breaking and scattering that contrarily holds Unnatural* Urges together, by emphasising the works’ relations (with themselves, with each other, with the Glasshouse, with the audience) as producing the connective tissue. The artworks look out at one another with love and while some parts resist description there is not a sense that anything is withheld. The works are themselves seductive and irregular, but as a collective they ask what experience could arise from new combinations, new departures, new positions (4).

Endnotes
1. Irigaray, L. (1993). An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Cornell University Press

2. A little while ago I read the short horror story “Honeydew Toxicity Event”, written by one of my all time favourite artists, Porpentine Charity Heartscape. In Honeydew, an unnamed and loveless protagonist is seduced from the micro ecosystem of 4chan and online games, to another far more violent, corporeal, and leaky social frame where they are given the name “Aphid Boy”, and what might be called affection. Under its creepypasta exterior, the narrative spills a number of provocations about the nature of desire, especially how it bleeds through gender and that extrapersonal network called the endocrine system. On the surface Honeydew is a horror story about the vulnerability of solitude presented with (a pretence of?) love, but underneath it's about jouissance, the ecstasy of surrender, the fluidity of ‘sex’ (all nouns, all verbs), and the impossible diffuse things we lump within the word ‘family’. I think about this story a lot while I’m sitting in the Glasshouse. I think about how desire and queerness often require or at least benefit from a separation from existing (read ‘cishet’, read ‘Capitalist’, read ‘white supremacist’) languages, and rules that insist things must fit within language structures. Honeydew is my first frame of reference for Unnatural* Urges, because both appreciate that desire is best understood as unstable, concerned with edges, and almost always a little funny.

3. From the outside, before entering the Glasshouse, Unnatural* Urges is presented as one organism. The press for the show does not include an image of a displayed artwork by all or any of the included artists. Instead there’s a digital collage that reminds me of a texture map unwrapped from a 3D digital model. It conveys texture, a lot of unstable information like tone and mood, and a lot of data that will be clarified when I see the context from which it has been unwrapped.

4. The shows collections of grown-over medical tubing, communities of algae-like sculptural creatures, heterogeneous repetitions of similar forms and icons, and layers of watery throbbing sounds bring to mind the model of biofilm. Biofilms occur in many different contexts and as a substance and mechanism it is billions of years old, but in the context of Unnatural* Urges what’s most relevant is where it occurs in conditions such as around medical implants. The biofilm is a mixture of different bacteria and microbes that individually would likely be seen off by a body’s immune system before they can replicate to a level having an impact on the body as a whole. However, that implant of steel, silicone, or whatever other material becomes a point where these little bacteria get stuck. After a while, there’s a bunch of them, all different kinds, joined together and made more resilient with proteins and enzymes and so forth. The biofilm is now a context where they can replicate, while other passing microorganisms might join it from outside. Eventually after threshold is reached the biofilm disperses its contents which will then start or join the process again somewhere else. Setting aside the human reality of infections, the model of the biofilm is a hopeful one. A collection of things, each different, build an environment amid hostile conditions and thrive where individually they would fall.