Edinburgh-based Andrew Gannon—along with 2025 Turner Prize winner Nnena Kalu, Daisy Lafarge, and Jo Longhurst, the three other artists currently featured in “We Contain Multitudes” at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) in Scotland—makes work from a position of disability, in his case a congenital limb difference. Gannon’s contribution to the exhibition is defined by a series of sculptures constructed from white plaster limb casts of his left arm. Arranged in a variety of configurations (together with large-scale paintings and a new set of body-referencing prints made during a residency in DCA’s print studio), these strange yet familiar forms hang from the walls on multicolored bungee ropes, hover in constellations held up by spindly metal stands, and sit like Brutalist maquettes on roughly made plasterboard “plinths” that recall mid-century furniture.
Some of the forms are connected to conspicuous electrical cables, others are partly painted in bright colors, but all are curiously evocative of something intangible—they are of the body, yet architectural, suggestive of utility but with no use at all. Describing these cast works, Gannon says: “The space that these sculptures embody is ambiguous. It is private, it is personal, it is part of my body, but at the same time…”
Chris Sharratt: Can you say a little about your plaster cast sculptures? What is the viewer actually looking at?
Andrew Gannon: The sculptures start with a plaster bandage cast taken from my left arm. I have a congenital limb difference, so I wear a prosthesis a lot of the time, and the first step to making a prosthesis is to make a plaster cast. The sculptures come from the observation that prostheses tend to be either functional or cosmetic, so I started with the question, “What are they if they’re neither of those two things?” When I first made them, they were almost wearable, eccentric limbs—absurd prostheses that I would bind objects into for live performances. They were props, but they quickly started to have a sculptural presence. The casts are quick to make and dry quickly once I take them off, and it wasn’t long before I started casting casts onto other casts, because when I was taking them off and putting them down, they started to assert themselves in different ways.
CS: What does the making process involve?
AG: I take a roll of plaster bandage, wet it, and then wrap the bandage around my left arm, which immediately makes it medically useless. Casting yourself is problematic since you’re doing two things at once. You can’t be still and make a good cast because you’re moving in order to make it, so it’s absurd and fails straight away, which is important to the work. I’m very fond of absurdity as a way of working; it’s rather like failure as a methodology. I can’t repeat these things, it’s too much to control, too much to handle, so it will always go wrong—hopefully in interesting ways. That’s why they all look different.
CS: Your art practice hasn’t always acknowledged your disability. What prompted the change?
AG: It became apparent to me around 2019 that I had been othering disability in my practice for a long time. So, I started pulling at the thread of disability, pulling at what it means to be disabled and to identify as disabled. It’s been an interesting five or six years, because when I first started centering disability in my work it felt radical, as well as necessary; once I was aware that I’d been keeping something out, it felt really important to put that front and center and to see what would happen. But it also felt like I may as well just kiss everything goodbye, because you know where this belongs, you know how this gets treated. To bring the work to “We Contain Multitudes” acknowledges that ableism in the art world is a thing and that perhaps my decisions around my disability were about knowing tacitly that it’s not supposed to be there. It’s something that we’d rather not look at that, or think about that, or talk about that.
CS: Is that because the art world isn’t interested in disability, that’s not what it does?
AG: Yes, and it’s also not what the world does. The reason that prostheses tend to be cosmetic is not necessarily because the wearer wants them to be—although they might—it’s so that other people aren’t upset.
CS: Although the cast sculptures all stem from the same process, they are presented in a range of different ways. For example, some of them are attached to bungee ropes or have electrical cables that disappear into floor sockets.
AG: I like working with materials that are in or around the studio, like the bungee rope and extension leads/cables. Both of those things are kinds of extensions; they fill a space in a way. They’re also absurd because they serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever—there is no bulb or anything else electrical in the sculptures. The idea of plugging them in and having them tethered also relates to my prosthesis, which is myoelectric—it has a battery, it requires power, so I am sort of tethered to a power source in order to use it. I also like the idea that, by plugging them in, I’m drawing attention to the floor sockets, which art galleries tend to cover up so they don’t draw your attention. So, the sculptures have bright orange cables—it’s making something visible.
CS: Although the sculptures have no actual purpose, they seem to possess echoes of practical, everyday objects. For example, the row of casts hanging on a wall from different lengths of colored bungee rope made me think of a row of phone booths.
AG: It’s funny, quite often associations come afterwards. The initial thing is just, “Oh, there’s a bungee cord there, I’ll make one with a bungee cord.” And then afterwards, I think, “Oh, I like this, and I like what it does formally, or I like what it does conceptually.” When I showed some of those pieces in a show in Canada a couple of years ago, people were (quite inappropriately) picking them up and talking into them, trying to use them as telephones.
There’s another group of sculptures in the show where the limb casts are cast into bases. They were made after observing lots of casts that I’d created just lying on the floor and remembering images of a hospital limb center where patient casts are kept. Because these are organic forms, they don’t tessellate, so you can’t stack them nicely. Instead, they get thrown into boxes or put into drawers, and they sit awkwardly. What I’ve done is cast these limbs into a plaster base that traps them in formalism. They have a different energy, I think. The others have a sort of potential—I can still put them on—whereas these are shut off, closed. They are what they are, they don’t go beyond that.
Photo: Ruth Clark, Courtesy Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA)
CS: You use color sparingly but in interesting ways with the casts. It seems to activate them somehow.
AG: If you look at my prosthesis, it’s bright yellow; it’s the opposite of cosmetics, the opposite of camouflage. The colors that I use are high-vis spray paint. So, it’s not painting, it’s not considered. I did painting as an undergrad so, ironically, it’s the removal of the hand of the artist in the painting. There’s no gesture. When I started painting them, it was just block color: I painted this one pink, that one orange, whatever high-vis colors I had. Some worked, some just killed an object dead flat, and what would happen is that I’d have something that didn’t work, and it would sit in the studio for 12 months. Then I’d pick it up again and cast it into something else.
In the case of one sculpture, I thought, “I’ll do a really bad paint job and then see what happens, see whether I can rescue it, see where it goes.” And invariably, in trying to make a really bad paint job, I got something where I thought, “Oh, I have to leave that.” So again, it’s like an attempt to kick the legs out from underneath something, to see what happens, to see if it goes in a different direction. Sometimes it works.
“We Contain Multitudes is on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland, through April 26, 2026.
