snails for eyes

16 Nov-14 Dec 2019

Overview

Saelia Aparicio | Jack Bodimeade | Naomi Gilon | Maria Gondek | Guy Marshall-Brown | Anna Reading snails for eyes is about the sea and its unknown depths. The works in the exhibition are tender studies of; resourcefulness, myth, lost relics, rituals, sunken islands, tourism, bubbling waters and outer space. The exhibition takes its title from the Buxton Mermaid ‘...made from wood, cloth, wire, carved bone and fish scales. She had snails for eyes’. The Buxton Mermaid is an example of the practice of mermaid making popular in the mid-nineteenth century. These sculpted objects were often made by fishermen and occasionally passed as real mermaid relics. Gazing at the dried and leathery body of this merrow, you can imagine it back in the sea, its skin supple and softened again...