Twin tub with Beaver installation

In the early 1980s, Bill Woodrow would collect his raw materials from the streets and junk yards in his neighbourhood. Often working with familiar, domestic objects, he gave them new meanings by peeling back their outer ‘skin’ to form new objects.

Here, the metaI casing of the defunct washing machine is cut away only to be remade in a new form, becoming host to the animal that emerges. Two worlds collide in an odd conjunction that brings together a symbol of consumerism, and a creature of the natural world. Woodrow explained ‘...it was bringing the two things together like a slice of life.’ Here, yoked together in an uneasy, inescapable relationship, they ask awkward questions about the nature of consumerism, re-cycling and ‘nature’ itself.