Hideous, Beasts and Corpses

Exhibition at Aberystwyth Arts Centre. Winter 2021.

The title references a quote from Aristotle ‘we enjoy looking at accurate likenesses of things which are themselves painful to see, obscene beasts, for instance, and corpses.’


These themes are explored through a series of scenes and characters loosely inspired by the biblical story of the Fall of Man from the Garden of Eden. The cast of which here focuses mainly on the symbolic motifs of a tree, a man and a woman in a landscape or a confined space. The exhibition in its entirety makes numerous visual references toward this subject and in art history, as well as others that celebrate ideas of paradise, excess and death. Such as The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, The Ambassadors by Holbein, or The Joy of Life by Matisse. Within which inventions of beauty and ugliness, wealth and knowledge, virtue and perversion are explored and celebrated as unique traits of human nature.