EMBRYO FETISH, 1965
Merz collage, including egg boxes. 18⅛ x 14in.
(46 x 36cm.)
Provenance
Bonham’s Chelsea, 20th September 1995, lot 565. Illustrated in b/w in the catalogue p.42.
Exhibited
Newlyn, Newlyn Art Gallery, 1967, No. 6, as Embryo.
Hamburg, Gallerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, 1969, No. 15, (as Embryo-Fetisch), dimensions given as 55 x 43 cm.
Bristol, Bristol Arts Centre, 1970, No. 24.
Penzance, Newlyn Orion Gallery, 1976, No. 55.
This is one of the works (Byzantine Cross, 1964 and Ephesian Diana, 1967 are others) in which packaging – an ephemeral item which surrounds an object - is transformed into the object itself, which is then enclosed within a frame: the container becomes the contained.
An egg contains within its protective shell the origins of life. An egg box is an inanimate object which protects the eggs it contains. Freud’s notion of the uncanny focuses upon confusion between the animate and the inanimate. Here, Colquhoun introduces a third element: a conflation of the animate, the inanimate and the robotic.
In the title Colquhoun makes a punning reference to the nature and function of the original containers: given free-range to her fantasy, the egg-boxes themselves have hatched into their own progeny.
A version of this work is known only from a photograph in the archive at the Hypatia Trust, Penzance.
