She’s worked with luminous slugs, murderous sex toys and inflatable slides. Now the Turner-nominated performance artist – and occasional nudist – is taking over the London Underground
It’s rush hour, but not as you know it. On a disused train platform, a gathering of giant toads, lizards and salamanders are causing quite a stir. Groups of schoolchildren stand and point, tourists pose for selfies and sleepy commuters squint in bafflement. It’s fun standing on the platform and clocking the expressions on passenger’s faces as they trudge down the stairs of London’s Gloucester Road tube station only to be confronted by their new amphibian travel companions.
“Normally my work is linked to bad taste and disarming humour,” says Monster Chetwynd, the artist behind the sculptures. “But these look oddly delicate, almost like Wedgwood porcelain.” While Chetwynd’s trademark childlike charm is present in the works, they’re less outrageous than some previous pieces. This, after all, is an artist who is making an ongoing film project – Hermito’s Children, begun in 2008 – about a transgender detective trying to solve the case of a woman who orgasms herself to death on a dildo seesaw (“Silly beyond words and teetered on the edge of porn,” wrote one Telegraph critic, before admitting: “I defy you to tear yourself away”). She also created a gothic, monochrome softplay centre called The Idol (sadly now closed due to Covid, rather than the fact it looked terrifying), lit up Tate Britain with gigantic, luminescent mating slugs and painted a wall with her bare bottom.
