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.
Increasingly we have become removed from the reality of our bodies, the body now as little more than a vector of contagion and disease, divorced from of our own immune systems. The Glory hole captures this schizophrenic relationship we have of this contemporary bodily condition. The socially distanced body removed but also simultaneously present, while various biological,
pharmaceutical and other introduced interventions are placed on the body to remove the reality of ‘the body’.
The Canadian B.C. Centre for Disease Control, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and others have recommended, in one way or another, the use of glory holes for sex. In New York, the city’s official COVID-19 safer sex bulletin didn’t mention glory holes directly, but it advised residents to “make it a little kinky” and “be creative with sexual positions and physical barriers, like walls.”
