more than meets the eye.

The Beauty Within: Marc Quinn, Spectrum of Sentience (2023)

Welcome to ‘more than meets the eye', flush editions’ new blog, intended to be an exploration through monthly posts of newly acquired editions. Mark Quinn’s recent 48hr timed release - Spectrum of Sentience - is the first artwork to feature. The pigment printed image of a human iris on 300gsm Somerset Photo paper was finished by hand, dripping a line of acrylic to add a visual element and making each edition unique.

Marc Quinn, Spectrum of Sentience (Human) (2023). Pigment print and acrylic on 300gsm Somerset Photo paper. Signed and numbered in pencil from the unique edition of 398

Sheet: 30 x 30cm

Iris prints

Spectrum is Sentience is part of a body of work dating back to 2009, in which Quinn depicts irises in a photo-realist, non-expressive way – enlarged, virtually abstracted with the pupil appearing as an aperture in the centre, its darkness bleeding into a turbulently streaked, spotted outer band suffused with vibrant chroma (the etymology of ‘iris’ is, after all, derived from the Greek word for rainbow). In these works the gaze dominates, not the subject’s visual gaze but the tissue of the retina, where light encounters the chemistry of the body and is transformed into images and thoughts. Brotton (2012) suggests that, ‘rather than producing his own gaze, Quinn transforms himself into an atavistic Cyclops, showing us the… interior zone of transformation that takes place between our inner and outer worlds, from where all creative acts originate.’ The iris, Quinn himself notes, ‘is our doorway to the world, the window we see out of and the doorway for light to enter and interact with our nervous system. They are like a leakage of the vivid inner world of the body to the monochrome world of the skin.’

Of course, the image of the iris – that map of identity and distinctiveness so crucial to our age of biometric surveillance – also compels perennial interrogations of the modern self. What defines us as individuals, and how do we understand individuality relative to the world? Although each iris is unique to each individual and thus arguably a celebration of individuality, the image’s abstract mapping of the self prompts the question, what precisely does it tell us about the person? Nothing.

Ultimately, this recurring leitmotif for Quinn positions humans as materially connected to everything else, extending to nature and the universe. Exploring his belief that ‘all sentient beings exist across an emotional and intellectual spectrum, [and that] we may not know where we all are in relation to each other, but we are all together on this journey’, he has expanded his series of iris portraits of humans to include animals. The companion 48hr timed release featured the iris of a Balinese cat.

References

Brotton, J. (2012) The Eye of History: Marc Quinn's New Cosmology, in M. Quinn, The Littoral Zone. Monaco: Musée Océanographique de Monaco, pp. 25-28.