In days of old much of the world remained uncharted. Crude maps outlined crude continents and vast swathes of the planet were depicted as monstrous voids or voids filled with monsters. There were loathsome and deformed fish and winged dragons and, as Shakespeare noted in Othello: ‘And of the Cannibals that each other eat/ The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders’.
Such creatures have been shunted aside in an age of air travel and satellites, but their demise is far from complete, judging by Adam Boyd’s most recent exhibition ‘Eyes In Their Shoulders, Mouths In Their Chests’. Boyd and Shakespeare were not the first to identify these monstrous creatures, who also appear in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (drafted around 77 – 79AD) as the North African Blemmyae tribe, which he describes as having ‘no heads, their mouths and eyes being seated in their breasts’. But despite his title, there are heads aplenty in Boyd’s show—distended heads, decapitated heads, tortured heads. Boyd’s subject here falls into a lineage that ranges from Caravaggio’s Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (c.1607-10) through to Joel-Peter Witkin’s Head of Dead Man, Mexico (1990) to Mike Parr’s ongoing plethora of decapitated self-portraits.
Indeed, Boyd shares much in common with Parr’s feverish output and at times manic line-work. Boyd’s work is far more tentative than Parr’s bold strokes of charcoal and is executed in pencil and ink, giving his macabre visions a lightness of touch that belies their tortured content. Such works as Weal of content and Good humour could be late night doodles by Hieronymus Bosch, suggestive of both physical and psychological trauma. Indeed, Good humour has more than