Angus Fairhurst’s eclectic work functions like a series of well told jokes, combining the endlessly reproduced forms and motifs of contemporary culture with dead-pan humour. Beginning as a private body of drawings and cartoons, since 1993 the figure of the gorilla has recurred throughout his practice. A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling is the first of a series of bronze sculptures in which the gorilla is engaged in absurd situations. Shown pulling his head off or contemplating a missing arm, the iconic figure expresses the confusion of the human condition in coming to terms with itself. The image conveys, with typical slap-stick vigour, “the discrepancy between many idealised things and their everyday reality”.
Angus Fairhurst
A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling, 2000
