THE WORM AND THE EARTH
GALERIE PCp, 8 RUE saint-claude, 75003 paris, france
DECEMBER 2024
The Worm and the Earth is House of Goblin’s first pop-up shop / exhibition hosted in Paris by galeriepcp. The tabletop presentation features pottery where the visitor is able to observe, touch, buy and leave with these items on-site. This shop held within an observational space also holds the ability to challenge orthodoxies we might usually associate with a look-don’t-touch gallery context. The curation sets up a playful scene, symbolic of ancient Germanic fairytale narratives or imaginary visions of a toy-makers workshop from bygone eras, where HoG’s one-off Mushroom Lamps and Containers are nestled amidst their editions of cups and plates, simulating a landscape reminiscent of a Forest. Abundance is the theme here, until slowly, throughout the show’s duration, components of the ‘total landscape’ start to diminish.
The Worm and the Earth
Worms loosen, mix, and oxygenate the soil as they burrow, helping water drain from the surface and store in the soils’ substrate. Worms’ movements deposit new soil on the surface, which can bury monuments over time. In this way, with the worms’ contribution, the earth builds a vessel around the physical past and contains it. A cycle occurs between organisms and biologies: human, annelid and the pedosphere (the outermost layer of the Earth).
A thing is formed by one and eventually consumed by the other. Scales oscillate but the process remains inculcated in their seemingly disparate existence. Humans make clay from soil generated by the worm, vessels are created from clay and buried in the soil, humans are eaten by the worm, the earth rejects the vessels made by the humans from the world of the worm. The cycle repeats.
