Oil on our mother’s back
Octopus Container (2025)
Not here to be liked
Steel shipping container, electronics, solar power system, 3D-printed replica of lost Lego octopus, fish tank, North Sea water, whale song, sea shanty, scientific facts, 3D-printed interpretation of Henry Moore's Mother and Child (1932), food colouring, water, water pumps, pipes, wood, paint, papier-mâché, printed materials
The installation uses a machine perception interface to configure itself in response to those who enter it. The container’s systems mimic octopus cognition – a distributed form of intelligence that reacts immediately to external environmental changes. One pathway into the space leads through grief towards the sound of the loneliest whale ‘singing’ to a plastic octopus, the sole survivor of the acid sea and the voice of Phoebe Plummer reading sections of the IPCC AR6. The other, in which a suspended sculpture of an octopus pours black liquid onto a 3D-printed interpretation of Henry Moore’s Mother and Child (1932), currently on view at the Sainsbury Centre. The installation draws from protest vocabulary and aesthetics to present a call for collective action in museums through resistance and song.