Exhibited in a 2022 show, it has since transformed in various ways: some bacteria has morphed into “beautiful, dried wafers in colour”, while other dishes “turned into a really weird blackish-green, really murky and a little scary”. Larner is no stranger to making alluring work out of strange materials, from human hair and false eyelashes to leather and surgical gauze. For her first major exhibition in the UK – A Hard Line to Bend at Camden Arts Centre in London – the sculptor has been transforming single-use plastic into pieces that bristle with seductiveness and menace.
We don’t even see them, all these different forms. We just use it.” Born to a California farming family in 1960, Larner recalls how the state “sprayed DDT [a toxic insecticide since banned] over our house for the first seven years of my life”. Engaging in recent years with eco-feminism (such as Rosi Braidotti’s 2019 book Posthuman Knowledge), she acknowledges her own ambiguous position.
But I feel like we need to see these materials in different ways. To try and imagine something different.” In our dystopian age of SpaceX technocrats (“There are all these movies about disaster, except our lives are the biggest movie about disaster”), it’s not only Earth that’s being eyed as a commodity. Larner’s ceramic “asteroids”, such as 2022’s Nyx, transpose official Nasa photos into 3D forms, their glazed surfaces crenellated and mesmeric.
Yet for all her precision, Larner is as preoccupied with what’s not there as what can be captured. When it comes to colour, she paraphrases Wittgenstein: how do we know if two people are ever seeing the same shade of yellow? And I want to make my work not to do that.
I want them to be together and to each have their interaction with each other.” The show’s eponymous work was inspired by the Burney Relief, a Babylonian terracotta plaque said by some to depict the mythological Lilith. She fled the Garden of Eden (sometimes portrayed as a snake), refusing her fate as Adam’s wife. And that’s powerful for everyone, not just women.” We’re speaking on the day that Gloria Steinem’s death is announced, and Larner namechecks the feminist pioneer – alongside Dolly Parton – as similarly trailblazing.
They went their own way but with such style and grace. They took a different path.” I ask Larner about her time studying at the California Institute of Arts with John Baldessari. But John let all that flow together,” she says.
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