Brat summer, goblin mode, bed rot weekends… It’s truly the era of Girls Gone Gross. But according to artist Abi Palmer’s current exhibition at Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre, Slime Mother, maybe we should also be embracing our inner slug.
A multidisciplinary creative whose work spans writing, film, sculpture and “sensory intervention”, Palmer’s Slime Mother builds on a body of work that was previously selected for the Frieze Corridor Commission last year and explores a long-gestating fascination with the slippery, otherworldly, and even sexy world of the slug.
While snails are the more acceptable, even beloved representatives of the gastropod family—small, slow, and tugging around collectable homes on their backs—Palmer advocates for their lesser-admired cousins. Frequently squished by bare feet with yelps as they invade kitchen floors, and salted with glee by kids exploring their sadistic sides in gardens; faceless, limbless, and with amorphous gender presentation, we wrinkle our noses at how unrelatable they are to us.
In Slime Mother, Palmer uses the exhibition space at Chapter to create a world in which slugs are more than accepted—they’re worshipped. The clearest evidence of this is stained glass boxes, arranged like altars and featuring angelic depictions of slugs with halos, slugs held delicately by human hands up to the heavens, and even slugs worming out of stigmata. Meanwhile, on the wall nearby, vintage-style prayer cushions you kneel on in church hang in a window pane formation, emphasising the topsy-turviness of the environment.
Palmer also creates a hands-on ritual with a huge bowl of wet clay, inviting you to smear a sluggy trail on a board, evocative of other tactile Christian rites like baptisms and Ash Wednesday crosses. A short film plays out what this fictional slug religion might entail—studying the creatures’ movements closely in the wild; their slime “reflecting heaven” rather than eliciting icky feelings, and the queerness of their sex lives a celebrated wonder rather than a derided difference. A ‘nun’ lights candles in Palmer’s stained glass constructions beside a pond, contextualising them in nature.
The knockout room of the whole exhibition is a surreal disco in which Palmer’s giant slug sculptures are suspended from the ceiling, spinning in a slow dance, alone or entangled, and speckled by the rainbow offshoots from a disco ball and soundtracked by brooding pop-rock. These sculptures are dotted around the exhibit, lounging on the floor, crawling on window sills, and even slithering inside shoes. It might not be physically immersive, but this parallel slug paradise Palmer has created is quick and easy to be charmed by as soon as you walk in.
Arguably, Palmer’s words convey her ideas more emotively, which is good news for interested parties who can’t make it to Slime Mother. Slugs: A Manifesto, which is available to read and purchase in-person, or here from Makina Books, is a beautifully written autobiographical journey from slug curious to slug devotee, with Palmer finding solace in the slimy and misunderstood beings while reminiscing about her sceptic Catholic upbringing, body image issues, the barriers faced by disabled students at Oxbridge, and the elitism of the art world. Not to mention a tonne of wild slug sex.
This is all interspersed with perhaps the artist’s antidote to ‘Live Laugh Love’ aphorisms: “Don’t be afraid to sleep all day if it suits you better… Be disgusting… Press your belly against the floor now. Feel yourself breathing. Don’t lose contact with the earth.” Consider me a convert to the church of slime.
words: HANNAH COLLINS
Fri 19 Jul, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff. Slime Mother is on until Sun 6 Oct. Admission: FREE. Info: here
