ANDY HOLDEN

Andy Holden’s artistic practice explores the anthropomorphic characteristics of everyday objects through a range of media. Holden’s Eyes in Space, 2014, comprising wobbly eyes glued onto wallpaper printed with images of the cosmos, and inspired by the artist’s large-scale paintings, not only summons an uncanny feeling of being closely monitored, as if surrounded by a phalanx of cartoon-like paparazzi, or the prickly gaze of a giant guilty conscience turning on itself, but offers the viewer an opportunity to step back from the daily tit-for-tat of personal or, more broadly, global political disagreements and see ourselves from the viewpoint of outer space, as the famous photograph of Earth taken aboard Apollo 17 in 1972 did, which seemed to condense human history and suffering to the size of a shiny blue marble.