British Council

Angus Fairhurst was born in Kent and studied at Goldsmiths College in London. Process plays a central role in Fairhurst's works. He consistently adheres to structure as a means of subjugating intentionality to the action of making. In early 'paintings' he used the device of a grid to regulate the structure and even replaced the brush strokes and any interference of colour with a series of holes drilled into hardboard panels. In Ultramarine Attachment, plastic tags, used in the clothing industry to attach labels and in so doing standardise commodity, are incorporated to emphasise the grid system, partially obscuring and regulating the surface of the photographic image taken from a magazine. Alongside such work, the artist had been engaged for some years in producing a series of anthropomorphic drawings, often using the figure of a gorilla engaged in a narrative cycle. The gorilla's appeal is that it can stand in for the human figure in a Darwinian sense, possessing near human form, but does away with the need for characterisation. When these essentially private drawings finally began to be shown, the gorilla image was brought to life and adopted by the artist as a form of alter ego. A series of actions in the video A Cheap and Ill-fitting Gorilla Suit showed the artist in a gorilla suit jumping up and down manically; the suit begins to disintegrate, shedding newspaper stuffing in the process, until the artist is revealed naked and all sense of illusion dispelled.

Dimensions Variable: New Works for the British Council Collection, The British Council 1997