Zubrick is Sleeping, 2026.
Installation, dimensions variable.
Zubrick operates as a pseudo self-portrait through which failure, shame, masculinity, and mortality are confronted. A singular character appears as an image of multiplicity, recurring across the installation. Through this repetition, the rat shifts from an individual figure into a condition of being. Sleep and exhaustion become spatially and temporally dispersed as a lonely stirring against the floor.
The intimate scale demands bodily attention, placing the viewer in a subtly dominant yet uneasy position and prompting a sense of domestic anxiety without theatricality. Deliberately pathetic, the rat forms elicit attention through weakness and an insufficiency for autonomy. What is encountered does not announce itself as sculpture so much as evidence, traces, remains, or sleepers. The rats’ postures mimic care, curled, tucked, almost held. An unresolved tension persists between care and disposal, between whether these forms are protected, mourned, or left behind.
The work insists that bodies are not separate from their surroundings, but extensions of the spaces they inhabit. Their whiteness closely matches the surrounding walls, allowing them to be partially absorbed into the architecture rather than emphatically placed within it. Corners function as zones of compression and neglect where things accumulate but are not meant to be seen. The floor–wall junction becomes a threshold between vertical order and horizontal residue. Through the rat as a peripheral figure, attention is redirected toward what is usually overlooked, heightening awareness of the space itself and how it holds bodies.
The work frames tiredness as action. Sleep is treated as a permanent state, an oblique reminder of death. The withdrawal reveals what persists when agency is suspended. Time is marked through presence and stillness.
Zubrick is Sleeping is permanently installed as part of Bath Spa University’s Locksbrook Permanent collection.
