Thinking About the Immortality of the Crab

By James Hewins

James makes physical and digital sculptures, installations and soundscapes with a strange, alien aesthetic. He is interested in dystopian futures and post-apocalyptic narratives. Physical sculptures are made with found materials as well as latex and silicone; digital software is used to recreate these forms and textures in a virtual world.

Thinking About the Immortality of the Crab is a visual contemplation of a dystopian future and the post-human. Synthetic flesh forms and crab-like creatures gather in a chaotic scene of an imagined future, amid remnants of the present-day. The mechanical and biological merge in the waste, illuminated by disembodied automotive lights. Seeping light from a backlit advertisement of an unknown product radiate across the rock face, lasers scan the landscape. The work is an assemblage of found materials and new forms.

‘Thinking about the immortality of the crab’ (Pensando en la inmortalidad del cangrejo) is a Spanish idiom about daydreaming. The phrase is usually a humorous way of saying that one was not sitting idly, but engaged constructively in contemplation or letting one’s mind wander.