Geometric Animals

Every so often an image comes along that stops the scroll cold, and Arran Gregory’s mirrored wolf is exactly that kind of image. At first glance it reads like a classic hunting-lodge trophy – the silhouette, the mounting board, the proud tilt of the head are all there. Then the eye adjusts and the fur resolves into hundreds of small mirrored facets, each one catching light at a slightly different angle, and the whole familiar object tips over into something uncanny and strange. It is taxidermy with its skin swapped for a thousand tiny mirrors, and it is one of those pieces of contemporary sculpture that photographs beautifully and somehow still undersells how good it is in person.

The sculpture is the work of London-based sculptor and illustrator Arran Gregory, who unveiled the wolf – alongside a faceted rhinoceros head cast from the same mirror-mosaic technique – as the centerpiece of his solo show ‘WOLF’ at Print House Gallery in London, running through September 6th alongside a series of his illustrations. Gregory builds each animal form first, then applies a dense mosaic of cut mirror shards across the surface by hand, panel by panel, until the geometry of the faceting reads as its own kind of fur – sharp, crystalline, and endlessly reflective of whatever room the piece happens to sit in.

That faceted logic is what gives the work its charge. Where a real taxidermy mount asks you to look at an animal, Gregory’s mirrored heads ask you to look at the room around the animal – and at yourself, fractured into dozens of small reflected fragments across the wolf’s muzzle and ears. It is a technique with an obvious kinship to the faceted picture planes of Cubism, translated from canvas into three dimensions and dressed up as a hunting trophy – equal parts homage to and rebellion against the taxidermy tradition it borrows its silhouette from. The effect sits somewhere between design object and sculpture, which is exactly the territory product and object design at its most inventive tends to occupy.

Below are the wolf sculptures from that Print House Gallery installation, photographed by Ravi Sidhu and Tida Finch – each angle catching a different pattern of light across the faceted surface, no two frames quite alike.

Arran Gregory is a London-based sculptor and illustrator. He recently opened a solo show entitled ‘WOLF’ at Print House Gallery in London. The exhibition, which runs through September 6th, includes both illustrations and a pair of gorgeous faux-taxidermy animals including a wolf and rhinoceros head sculpted from mirrors. You can see much more on his Tumblr and a number of prints are available in his shop. Photos above by Ravi Sidhu and Tida Finch. (via fancy)