Ian Haig works across media, from video, sculpture, drawing, technology based media and installation. Haig’s practice refuses to accept that the low and the base level are devoid of value and cultural meaning. His body obsessed themes can be seen throughout a large body of work over the last twenty years. Previous works have looked to the contemporary media sphere and its relationship to the visceral body, the degenerative aspects of pervasive new technologies, to cultural forms of fanaticism and cults, to ideas of attraction and repulsion, body horror and the defamiliarisation of the human body.
Kellogg's cornflake's wholesome iconic healthy family goodness is played out against a perverse narrative of a fanatical, sexual, health psychopathology bubbling beneath the surface.
Kellogg's bowel training health camp issued enemas, experimental bowel surgery and believed a clean body equals clean thoughts. The Dirt Factory explores the contemporary health pre-occupation of detoxing and cleansing, and its origins in the development of the cornflakes breakfast cereal and its founder Dr John Harvey Kellogg.
The exhibition plays on notions of dirt and aesthetics, culture, art and the body: the clean/unclean, healthy/unhealthy, low/high, distasteful/tasteful and the beautiful/ugly. The notion of dirt producing a loaded symbolic value of the other, the abject, the unknown and the alien. The dirt factory becomes an analogy for the human body, a machine engineered for producing filth.
