Alexander Hoda

“When I was younger I traipsed around museums like the V&A, and the Rodin Museum in Paris. I saw a lot of classical statues but I was really more interested in the toys in the tourist shops. As I got older I wanted to try and make those interests mould into one thing. The use of rubber in my work was a way to try and find a material that had the same fetishistic appeal as metal but wasn’t. I’ve always been interested in natural history programmes and was brought up, like many kids, on David Attenborough. We have a fascination with animals; they act as a mirror to ourselves. In some ways we’re able to understand the way we act in terms of animals. In Saddleback I wanted there to be an ambiguity between the animals caring for one another but also trying to manipulate each other; it captures an indecisive moment between where caring becomes possessive.”

“Pile Up was inspired by a knick-knack I bought on eBay, a stack of pigs piled one on top of the other; a bizarre but appealing thing. It was like they were emerging out of one form. I had also just visited the Uffizi in Florence where I saw Michelangelo’s The Captives, a series of studies he made where only partial elements of figures appear emerging from stone blocks. I wanted to explore the relationship between these two references. There’s a sexual insinuation in the way the rubber gives an initial binding of the figures, a uniform coating, but also violence in enhancing the dynamics between the forms. With traditional figurative sculpture an artist literally hacks away at something to create or destroy a figure; sculpture is violent. Sculpture is a bodily experience, you are confronted by an object that inhabits the same space as you do.”

“For this piece I wanted to have more of a scene, like the narratives within classicism and mythology, but my own. It’s like a freeze-frame of a moment. I make my sculptures by collaging found objects to form the composition and then coat the entire surfaces with rubber. This is a way to ‘dress up’ the objects, to make them re-perform in a different environment, re-contextualise them with new meanings. The found objects and masks underneath the surfaces give the effect of an inflatable object that’s almost expanded to the point of collapse. In my work I am exploring relationships, desires, and urges, to perceive them in different contexts rather than something that’s conditioned to be guilt-laden or perverted.”