Roger Hiorns

British sculptor Roger Hiorns makes objects that explore transformation, both material and perceptual. Using divergent and often esoteric found materials—jet and automobile engines, plastinated cow brains, perfume, thistles—Hiorns collides the natural and manmade. His work often engages a variety of organic and chemical processes such as treating objects with substances like amyl nitrate, steroids, or salt, and past works have incorporated such elements as foam and fire.

For his Aspen Art Museum exhibition, Hiorns created a new group of works exploring transparency as a sculptural property. The works combined incredibly thin, ballistics-grade transparent plastic with nearly invisible bits of brain matter from cows. While transparency suggests a membrane, a physical mediating layer, the brain alludes to cognition and control, and therefore becomes a perceptual, immaterial intermediary. As in much of Hiorns’s work, the sculptures become material expressions of anxiety, as the cold rationality of industrial production is held in uneasy balance with the unpredictability of natural processes.