22nd Oct - 19th Nov 2022
Beresford Street
SE18 6BU London
“Man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a body that once belonged to a fish (and still carries the gill- marks to prove it). His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever.”
(Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death)
‘The Worm at the Core’ is a group show in which we invited artists to consider how fear of death impacts our day-to-day life and individual decisions.