Peter Ferguson, Felicity Spear and Shane Jones

Peter Ferguson (Vegetal Head)
Australian, born 1956

Felicity Spear (Locus (T))
Australian, born 1946

Shane Jones (Leap)
Australian, born 1955

Vegital head / Locus (T) / Leap 2000
pencil, photograms, pin hole photograph and oil paint
Geelong Gallery, Gift of Bendigo Art Gallery, 2007

This collaborative work is a contemporary example of the ‘exquisite corpse’: a drawing exercise developed in 1925 by European Surrealist artists. Inspired by traditional parlour games, an exquisite corpse was created by folding a piece of paper horizontally into a concertina, onto which, in turn, each member of a group drew a part of a body without being able to see what others had drawn on the paper.

Driven by the Surrealists’ interest in unconscious and random processes of creativity, exquisite corpses demonstrate the effects of juxtaposition and chance as critical artistic forces. The resulting bodies, as these two collaborative works reveal, are often strange creations of contrasting or even impossible elements.