ian haig: the dirt factory
In the waiting room of a small day-spa, two customers fill out a medical form-come-product information list. One of them is staring at a naively painted fresco of cascading sheets bunching up in places into something resembling a clean, white anus.
Having handed over my gift voucher I’m face down on a table with pressurised lukewarm water striking what I’m told are my meridians. The treatment I chose upon booking was a rainbow-shower massage. I’m lying there praying that we don’t strike gold at the end of the rainbow.
After a series of frenetic and vigorous rubbings, the massage therapist proceeded to kneed a part of my back that was feeling a bit crunchy.
‘What’s that do you think?’ I ask.
‘Toxins’ she says shifting the water so that it goes up my right nostril.
It would seem that every time she came to something that felt a bit ‘twangy’, ‘crunchy’ or ‘lumpy’, that it was those pesky toxins that needed shifting. But where was she shifting them to?
Wandering around between the cornflake-sprayed installations and faecal-like graffiti smears, my first impression of Ian Haig’s exhibition The Dirt Factory, is that Haig is an articulate tinkerer. Using a variety of household media from plumbing to breakfast cereal, Haig fashions found objects into whimsical distillation machines, operated by those spectres of paranoia and disgust that dwell within pipe-dreams of platonic cleanliness.
Ian Haig has a knack for producing uncanny machines with obscure psychic functions and user-unfriendly interfaces. Sculptures such as Bowel Detox Unit and Mutant colonic Irrigation Cornflake Machine are in part a homage to the crackpot ‘therapeutic’ devices invented by John Harvey Kellogg and put to use at his