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Ashley Crawford spoke with Benjamin Armstrong about his recent work
In olden times it was often believed that the egg or spermatozoon in the human reproductive cycle contained what was called a homunculus, a diminutive but fully formed human being. No doubt the earliest medical experiments to prove this fact would have led to some ghastly scenarios enacted on bodies retrieved by the resurrectionists (grave robbers) and a bizarre array of glass vessels filled with macabre attempts to prove this theory. As viewers and voyeurs we are both attracted to and repulsed by the grotesque; witness the hordes of visitors to Gaetano Zumbo’s infamous collection, Anatomia Barocca, in La Specola museum in Italy, or the curiosities and grotesqueries of the Mütter Museum in the College of Physicians of Philadelphia or the jars of deformed foetuses in the war museum of Saigon. There is something about the flesh gone awry that pricks at some dark dread that is mixed with a visceral delight. There is something of this quality in the strange attraction that Benjamin Armstrong’s work inspires.
Armstrong’s weird, waxy distended eyeballs and strange hour-glass sculptures were standout works in such recent high-profile group exhibitions as ‘A Room Inside’ at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne University, ‘Before the body – Matter’ at the Monash University Museum of Art and ‘Primavera’ at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. But it was with his first commercial exhibition, ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ at Melbourne’s Tolarno Galleries earlier this year, that Armstrong made his mark.
Writing in The Australian, critic Sebastian Smee waxed lyrical, describing Armstrong’s foray as ‘the most dazzling show of the new gallery season’.
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