Mat Collishaw: The Centrifugal Soul

In The Centrifugal Soul, Mat Collishaw’s forthcoming exhibition at Blain|Southern, the artist presents new sculpture, installation and paintings that emerged from his interest in a theory about why humans make and display art.

Collishaw worked with evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller – whose theory that the origins of art stem from natural instincts of courtship and reproduction – to produce the title work and centrepiece of the exhibition. The Centrifugal Soul is a sculpture in the form of a zoetrope, a pre-film animation device that produces the illusion of motion through rapid rotation and stroboscopic light.

The zoetrope animates scenes of birds of paradise and bowerbirds as they perform elaborate mating rituals. The work offers a captivating demonstration of how aesthetic diversity has evolved through sexual selection and also reflects the artist’s ongoing examination of our insatiable appetite for visual stimulation. Collishaw’s sculpture embodies Miller’s idea that evolution has created an inescapable drive to be noticed above the visual competition, feeding our need for self-promotion.