Secretors          (1993 – )

Secretors          (1993 – )

Lead crystal, manifestation juice
Various dimensions: generally around 60cm x 10cm x 7cm each

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With the sculptural installation series Secretors Chodzko was exploring how to visualise and make physical the experience of first sensing an immanent transformation occurring within the external environment, and, or, within one’s mind.  A collapsing of all that had been.  This event, often present in fantasy, horror and sci-fi literary and cinematic narratives, reveals something inchoate emerging into personal or public space, that can be perceived as both terrifying and beautiful.  Secretors are particularly based on the horror genre where a building is seen to leak blood, having become not just an architecture visited or inhabited by bodies but a body itself, excessive and transforming.  

In  exhibition, Secretors are installed around a building (often the gallery space) as a metaphor for the experience of the familiar and everyday suddenly, or insidiously, becoming undermined, ruptured by the intrusion of other realities. Chodzko embeds them into the walls or ceilings, so that they appear as small eruptions of blood oozing from wounds.  What we thought we knew becomes unstable and fluid, demanding that we acknowledge change, having finally perceived a shift to our position within a system.  Mark Fisher,  analysis of the ‘weird’* in relation to writer HP Lovecraft describes a fiction ‘in which the outside  “can make an irruption, through time and space, into an objectively familiar locale”‘.  With Secretors this outside –  from beyond – is implied, but this outside is also somehow an inside, a leaking body, certainly in relation to the apparently hard, clean, austere, yet supposedly ‘neutral’ interior exhibition space of the white cube.

Perceiving this moment of transition, between solid architecture and liquid, as suspended in time, Chodzko gave titles to individual Secretors as speeds of 1000’s of km/hr. If we are able to see them as still objects, then, both we and they must be frozen in time, as a freeze frame, held, but just about to return to temporal normality again. These titles also, in their specificity, attempt to contain, understand and catalogue these forms. As forms they resemble the initial oozing of blood from a pin prick on skin, and are made from a clear lead crystal vessel, blown and shaped by breath and gravity, then filled with dark red fluid (‘manifestation juice’).  For Chodzko the Secretors are a form of kit. A prop. Something you add to a building, a home or a large institution, as a reminder of constant transformation,  instability and the unknown. In this way, as an art object that ‘does something’ – to be utilised in order to facilitate visual perception – they have a similar role to Chodzko’s Mask Filters, M-path, Props. For memorising the gravity of mime objects, Ghost or Deep Above, and The Dreamshare Seer, etc.

Secretors often seem barely perceptible, noticed from looking awry, only glimpsed whilst looking at something else, as they lurk away from the normal locations of artworks in a gallery space. In the exhibition space they seem to emerge from the periphery, cracks and odd joins in the architecture, places within the gallery that would normally be overlooked. They are allude to the experience of half-seeing, transformation and suspension. They suggest an attention into particular places and brief specific moments but also shape for the viewer the sense of a vast body, embedded into the architecture and now beginning to stir.
In relation to the rest of Chodzko’s practice Secretors act as a kind of ‘root’ (preceded by Transmitters, and followed by Flashers, and then Runners) to the spaces he creates in his work between a realist actuality, as intervention in social space, and a psychic space that emerges from, and feeds back into this reality, with us the viewer as a crucial part of this fluid network.

                                   *cf;  Mark Fisher “The Weird and the Eerie”, p.20, here quoting Maurice Lévy’s text about HP Lovecraft.

The imagining of bodies and buildings merging together in order to catalyse change also appears in works such as Hole (2007), and Because… (2013) and Holding the Earth this Way (2022)

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Temporary installations of Secretors include the following exhibitions:  Wonderful Life, The Lisson Gallery, London (1993), High Fidelity, Kohji Ogura Gallery, Nagoya (1994), Brilliant!, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis (1995), General Release, British Council selection for Venice Biennale, Scuola San Pasquale, Venice (1995), Perfect, Jan Mot, Brussels (1996), It Always Jumps Back and Finds its Own Way, Stichting de Appel, Amsterdam (1997),  Bad Behaviour, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2003), From There, Bloomberg Space, London (2006), The Dark Monarch, Tate St Ives (2009), The Dark Monarch, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne (2010), BLOOD TEARS FAITH DOUBT, The Courtauld Gallery, London (2010), Somewhat Abstract, Nottingham Contemporary (2014),  PAUL STOLPER + ICA Editions, ICA, London (2019), Too Cute, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (2019),  The Horror Show, Somerset House, London (2022).

They have also appeared in the backgrounds of photographs in fashion magazines; in the foreground of a Frieze magazine cover ( (No. 31, Nov-Dec 1996), (apparently, slowing time, sustaining engagement, delaying the inevitable removal of the Kara Walker cover from the previous issue);  in the background of an interview on ITV’s News at Ten (1994) and in the dark corners of John Maybury’s biopic of Francis Bacon, Love is the Devil (1998).

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