Horseshoe crab
The horseshoe crab has been a fascination for Mock since childhood and once more this piece questions our earliest origins. The fossil record has shown that the body design of the horseshoe crab has remained unchanged for roughly 450 million years. This characteristic makes it one of the oldest living fossils.
By creating an outsized bright pink velvet sculpture, the artist poses the question: what makes a species so successful in terms of deep time and how can these organisms survive the world’s greatest cataclysms and mass extinctions? What can we learn from them and add to our own capability to adapt to environmental change, and how do we need to transform ourselves so as to avoid our own destruction as a species?
2014 Velvet/ flock, polyester resin 260 x 140 x 60 cm. By creating a sculpture which seems alien, deterring and spiny, Mock has envisioned it as feminine pink and outsized. An almost popart version of a creature not recognizable at first glance, its huge strangeness striking, complex and decorative at the same time.