“Some Thing”
Ian Haig
16 Aug → 7 Sept 2013

A fusion of David Cronenberg’s New Flesh and William S. Burroughs transmuted bodies that populate The Naked Lunch. When referring to the junkie’s mutating body in The Naked Lunch, Burroughs sees it as loosing its “human citizenship and was in consequence, a creature without a species”. Some Thing, is too perhaps a creature without a species, an aberration of flesh, guts and gristle that renders the human body as unclassifiable meat. It is what Burroughs refers to as un-D.T. – Undifferentiated Tissue, a condition whereby the body and it’s flesh liquefies and transforms into a new form.

Ian Haig's work references the teratological body, the body turned inside out, its internal viscera exposed and appearing in places that it shouldn’t, like a DNA experiment that has gone horribly wrong. The work too plays on notions of the abject and uncanny, as the body appears caught in between states of the living and the dead, in the throes of dying or possibly being born. Some Thing depicts a body that was possibly once human and is now on its way to being something else, it is either sub human or post human, we can’t quite be sure.

This is a body that maybe represents the subjective state of disease or illness, and how such conditions alter our very imaginings of what the body is. Our latent fears, unconscious horror and disgust of the body manifest as a thing not of this world. The work is concerned with ideas of attraction/repulsion of the body and how the two are more closely aligned than we think.