Curated by re:place, the silicone boys are temporarily  sited in  the Erewash Museum during Ilkeston Festival.  Twenty brightly coloured silicone children’s heads,  similar in colour to jelly baby sweets, swamp the interior of a faithfully  recreated 1950’s grocery shop.

The characteristics of the faces present an idealised archetype and are redolent of an illustration from an 'oldschool’  children’s novel. The ‘shop’ suggests and evokes  the memory of a more  human and personal kind of world, before global consumerism dominated the high street.  Both the head  forms and the shop reflect a  different era, and perhaps a more optimistic world.

In this situation the silicone boys contrast a sense of belonging - through  the  kids being quite literally in the sweet shop - with a sense of loss and  displacement, through the materials, the inanimate facial expressions and the play-off between the idealised 1950’s and the resolutely contemporary  sculptural forms. The heads balance visual playfulness with immobility and  awkwardness, appearing as if buried from the shoulders down. They are stuck in a scrum at floor level and unable to access the confectionery. 

Like  much in life the sweets are on  offer, but beyond reach.

tom hackett sculpture

the silicone boys re:place

site intervention in the erewash museum