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.
Taking its name from the purple Teletubbie and a body that has fused with the video screen and the media environment. In my version of Tinky Winky, the Teletubbie is replaced with a human body/skin, where the 'magical' screen functions as a portal into the unknown dimensions and interior of the human body.
Literally taking Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the body being extended and amputated by various media. Tinky Winky presents the torso of the human body with its head and appendages removed/amputated with a new biological outgrowth of the video screen in its stomach.
