A seashell is a mollusk’s exoskeleton. Washed ashore after the animal’s death, it appears as a jewel upon the sand—a protective shelter now exposed as vulnerable. Fortification for the mollusk, the shell can outlast the animal by thousands of years. And yet a sandy pulp of rocks and shells, formed over eons, squishes between the beachcomber’s toes. 

In his sculptural series The Archaeology of Art, Marc Quinn transforms actual seashells into monumental forms. Spiral of the Galaxy, one work from this series, now finds a home in a public courtyard of the Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin. The work is a massive bronze, ten feet high by fourteen feet long and weighing seven tons—an enlarged replica of a particular shell that Quinn once held in his hand. In it, the artist celebrates the magnitude of a delicate, natural world.

The sliding scales along which a society measures fragility and strength, ephemerality and endurance, even life and death, are central concerns of Quinn’s art. Throughout his career he has explored the unstable margins of life and the meanings we may find in them; the vital interconnectedness of all life forms across time; the desire to still a passing moment or to live forever; the prospect of living in harmony with nature and with other people. His work is fundamentally existential.

Among Quinn’s earliest and best-known works is Self (1991), a cast of his own head made from ten pints of his own frozen blood. This self-portrait as a revised classical bust not only represents the artist but also consists of him, here exemplifying the ways in which form and substance converge in his work to make meaning. Self depends on refrigeration to maintain its solidity, and therefore exists on a kind of life support, symbolizing life’s many dependences—a word that may be considered in more than one sense: Quinn was an alcoholic at the time. But the work also celebrates life’s vitality. The ten pints of blood constituting the sculpture equal the amount in Quinn’s body. For him, the head’s existence alongside his own signals the powerful regeneration of life. 

Quinn first came to public attention in the early 1990s through his affiliation with the so-called Young British Artists, or YBAs.  Now historical rather than descriptive, the label denotes a group of artists, then in or fresh out of art school, who exhibited together and appeared to flout artistic austerity in favor of shock value and publicity, with the further hope of sales. Yet we are still susceptible to YBA artists’ reinterpretations of realism and embrace of populism through relatable subject matter and a range of nontraditional materials. In a 2013 interview with curator Germano Celant, Quinn said that, for him, the YBA movement had been about “bringing real life into art.” In Self he achieves this, materially and thematically, as he does in Spiral of the Galaxy. Quinn’s urge is holistic and metaphysical, a desire to translate the substance of life into image. 

But his work is motivated by the ethical as well. In his sculptural series The Complete Marbles, for instance, Quinn subverts Western ideals of “Beauty” and “Virtue.” Inspired in part by broken classical sculptures, such as the Venus de Milo, the series depicts people born without limbs or who have lost limbs through accident or illness. Made from direct molds of the subjects’ bodies in collaboration with traditional marble masons in Tuscany, the sculptures appropriate the authority of Neoclassicism to promote more inclusive views of humanity grounded in diverse bodies and life experiences. The culmination of this series, Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005), is a fifteen-ton monument created for public display. Lapper, an English artist born without arms and with shortened legs, appears in a dignified pose during her eighth month of pregnancy. Temporarily installed on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square in London—a site built in commemoration of British war heroes—the sculpture challenged people to examine and expand their own notions of both physical beauty and heroism.

As reported to Celant, Quinn believes that “beauty lies in reality, that it is beyond appearances and is about feeling contradictory emotions at the same time in a compelling way.” The apprehension of beauty, in this sense, is a dialectical process involving sensory and intellectual perception, emotion, and participation in the world; whatever it is, beauty is not idealized form isolated from life. Quinn’s view recalls the philosopher John Dewey’s influential treatise Art as Experience, which presents aesthetic experience as a qualitative intensification of life experience. For Dewey, as for Quinn, art lies not merely in the art object but rather manifests through the meaningful experiences of those who perceive it.

Spiral of the Galaxy, 2013

Quinn selected the shell for Spiral of the Galaxy from the British Natural History Museum collection and scanned it in three dimensions to create a digital image of its surface. This file then went to Belgium, where the manufacturing corporation Materialise produced a sculptural prototype through stereolithography, or 3D printing. Enlarged to the work’s final dimensions, the prototype required sectioning into several pieces before shipment to Spain, where the foundry Fademesa produced the mold and cast it in bronze. What results is a figure at once familiar and strange, as shifts in material and scale preserve details of the natural shell and yet transform its mode of inhabiting the world. No longer a delicate object inviting intimate handling, Quinn’s shell has become a solid, architectural form, now occupying public space and affecting the urban ecosystem. 

On the medical school campus, Spiral of the Galaxy sits among a system of roads and buildings as well as cultivated green spaces with trees, benches, and some wildlife (Austin’s ever-present grackles and squirrels). Integrated with these surroundings and yet standing in deliberate contrast, the sculpture comes alive through one’s awareness of its interactions with the environment. What sound does the wind make passing over and across this massive bronze? How does its polished inner surface reflect the sky, greenery, buildings, or one’s own face? Such questions may lead to mindful interrogations of ourselves as well as a heightened sense of the ways we too are sited in this place, or even in the world. 

The public space the sculpture inhabits is not only physical, however, but also social and discursive. What a community chooses to monumentalize, and how, tells us something about who they are or want to be. Traditional monuments not only portray sanctioned “heroes” but also instruct the public in how to understand them, through explanatory plaques or codified gestures that convey the figure’s cultural authority. Such monuments construct or reinforce public identity narratives in which both agents and manners of virtue arrive pre-prescribed. But, like his sculpture of Alison Lapper, Quinn’s monumental seashell seems to counter that tradition by asking us how we want to be, not telling us who we are. Seashells are ahistorical and acultural, as people across the world have marveled at their organic complexity for millennia; they carry no determinate values but simply are. By honoring the distinctive features of an individual specimen, Spiral of the Galaxy might challenge us to see value in the muteness of pure existence.

Robin K. Williams is a doctoral candidate in art history at The University of Texas at Austin.