all images courtesy Darren Banks and Workplace Gallery
Darren Banks: Blobs
The Blob first crept onto movie screens, and into the collective consciousness in 1958, as an unstoppable, flesh-eating, gelatinous mass. In the fifties as we pushed to the outer limits of Space (Sputnik was launched in 1957) and the innermost realms of DNA (discovery of the double helix, Watson and Crick, 1953), so the Blob was found during excavations in remote territories...
Examined under a microscope, the Banks Blobs occupy the fragile states between animal instinct and artificial intelligence...we see visceral qualities of genetic material--held in a tenuous equilibrium with industrial looking elements, though warped and melting...with delicate menace...
In Larry Cohen's 1985 film The Stuff, an amorphous, sweetly tasting, highly addictive substance is commercially marketed to the public, gradually permeating and infecting every corner of American society...the stuff is actually a parasitic alien substance which uses humans as its hosts, manipulates them until it finally discards their dead, husk-like bodies...
Post millenium, Banks' Blobs are best viewed through a kaleidoscope...we catch glimpses of the potentially familiar debris of our everyday landscapes...could that be the arm of an easy chair, raising its head like a dinosaur from the primeval swamp?...are those collected globules the remains of an X-box controller, melted and deformed in a house fire?...
Examined under a microscope, the Banks Blobs occupy the fragile states between animal instinct and artificial intelligence...we see visceral qualities of genetic material--held in a tenuous equilibrium with industrial looking elements, though warped and melting...with delicate menace...
In Larry Cohen's 1985 film The Stuff, an amorphous, sweetly tasting, highly addictive substance is commercially marketed to the public, gradually permeating and infecting every corner of American society...the stuff is actually a parasitic alien substance which uses humans as its hosts, manipulates them until it finally discards their dead, husk-like bodies...
Post millenium, Banks' Blobs are best viewed through a kaleidoscope...we catch glimpses of the potentially familiar debris of our everyday landscapes...could that be the arm of an easy chair, raising its head like a dinosaur from the primeval swamp?...are those collected globules the remains of an X-box controller, melted and deformed in a house fire?...
excerpt from an essay on Banks' blob drawings by Iris Aspinall Priest 2010
