'The World and Its Inhabitants', 1981-2000
24 Mechanical figures with Ringmaster's costume and chronometer
Installation view Christine Burgin Gallery

The World and Its Inhabitants was first conceived as a miniature circus, a salon divertissement. It was always intended as a very intimate, ritualistic form of 18th-century parlour activity. An elaborate meal was prepared for perhaps seven guests, with small, electrically operated characters presented between courses to aid digestion and invigorate the intellect. This miniature Oracle has become a process of cataloguing personalities. The assembled personalities form an idealised world where history has been plucked from its source and re-presented in three minutes of singular action, with a wit and sarcasm thrown into a cauldron fit for the likes of Gillray and Cruikshank. The beginnings were a touch ritualistic: dressed in a papier-mache mask and dancing boy costume from Act III of Kismet, I clinically mixed Nexus talcum powder with two blends of tea and a small amount of dynamite within a circle of earth extracted from Mount Vesuvius. An electric current was passed through a length of magnesium ribbon lying across this respendent mound: a colossal blinding explosion erupted, leaving a white cloud of malodorous disposition and the ungainly presence of Nextus II. A spindly character of five inches in height and stooped in an aggressive pose, he sported a vicious tongue and ultramarine ears physically linked to disproportionately grand genitalia, these last being electronically illuminated at the instigation of life.