Sam Keogh | The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle Cartoon

About

The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle Cartoon is an installation of large-scale figurative collage by artist Sam Keogh. These intricate works on paper draw heavily from The Hunt of the Unicorn, a series of seven tapestries made in Flanders at the turn of the 16th century and now housed in The Met Cloisters, New York.

Flemish tapestries from this period required vast wealth to produce and were commissioned by aristocrats or wealthy merchants to demonstrate their social standing. During the French revolution, many such artefacts were either iconoclastically destroyed or repurposed toward more useful ends. In this way, sections of The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries were used to protect fruit trees and potatoes from frost or to keep horses warm in the winter months. The tapestries’ surfaces are pockmarked by areas of damage and repair – a material index of these political events, each a fraying, tearing and patching up of Europe’s historical narrative.

In Keogh’s work, the rarefied world depicted in the tapestries is re-made as a series of cartoons, or 1:1 scale working drawings made to produce a tapestry. Here, the fantastic scene of the killing of a unicorn is invaded by a cast of monstrous entities. These characters are Frankensteined together with limbs, heads, faces and personal effects from a wide array of sources; some are plucked from pre-modern paintings, others from algorithmically targeted advertising on social media and still more from present day 'fantasy' franchises such as The Lord of the Rings or the Dark Souls video games. Many hold scissors or craft knives, suggesting that they have cut and pasted themselves together before cutting and pasting themselves into the world of the tapestries. Limbs are multiplied and entangled, and faces are made up from folded, torn, and recomposed layers of background and foreground. It's difficult to tell where distinct bodies begin and end, or whether they are destroying or building the world they inhabit.

During the exhibition the installation will be used by Keogh to stage two performances. These live interventions will see Keogh interact with the collaged elements of the work, using them as a visual script, folding and unfolding their surfaces to guide a monologue which will describe and rewrite the history of the original tapestries. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication with newly commissioned writing by Joseph Buckley, Francis Jones, and Adrian Rifkin.

Artist Bio:

Sam Keogh works with installation, sculpture, performance, drawing, collage, writing and video. These elements are often combined in elaborate built environments, installations incorporating diverse materials and objects like giant tortoise shells, melted plastic skeletons, ceramic pigs, MDF cryogenic chambers, papier-mâché apple cores; or roots made from vacuum packed rubbish. These grotesque concoctions of image, object and detritus serve as props and visual cues for performances, but spill over with idiosyncratic detail and extraneous information – the physical remnants of a fictional world, they present an indeterminate space in which materials, memories and affects begin to smudge into each other. Like the sprawling and rebellious environments that house them, they present “a strange and abject cosmology of trash, contamination and revolt”.

Sam Keogh lives and works between Glasgow and Co. Wicklow, Ireland.