Intuition Loop

Harrison Pearce is an emerging artist, living and working in London. His works come from autobiographical events and he draws from these to explore philosophical ideas, with an emphasis on the mind, body, language and experience.

Pearce’s solo show in the gallery, Intuition Loop, featured two large-scale sculptural installations and series of etchings. Intuition Pump 2016, is a kinetic work made from steel, latex, wood, pneumatics and a logic computer. The skin of the monoliths is made from latex rubber and when the machinery inside gets going the metallic appearance is betrayed. They perform a number of actions: they breathe like an enormous lung and inflate as though impregnated, one tips over whilst objects whip around inside the other, striking the rubber surface. The actions correspond to a program through which the two towers are in conversation so that the sequence is always changing. This piece plays with philosophical ideas about the mind-body problem, and was made in response to a medical misdiagnosis following CT and MRI scans of Pearce’s brain; he was told its morphology showed signs of ‘severe atrophy’ but, mercifully, this was a mistake. Nonetheless he lived with the belief that his mental faculties would soon diminish until further investigation alleviated that fear. This disturbing experience got Pearce thinking about contemporary belief systems and about how scientific or technological evidence can determine first-hand sensation. The prints, which accompany the sculptures, record the artist’s experience and refer to the visual language of medical scans, tracking some of his thoughts, feelings and ideas along the way. They are at once dark and foreboding as well as playful and inquisitive.