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'Walking in My Mind' image gallery
By Helen Sumpter

Posted: Thu Jul 2 2009
The Hayward Gallery's summer blockbuster, 'Walking in My Mind', attempts to divine the inner workings of the artistic imagination. Here Time Out turns psychoanalyst, as we put ten artists from the exhibition on the interpretive couch... (Click on any image to see a photo gallery of all ten installations)
- Yayoi Kusama
  
  Yayoi Kusama recreates her hallucinatory visions as colourful 3D landscapes on Astroturf lawns or as mirrored chambers containing spotty, skittle-like sculptures. These environments may look like a child’s playground but the repetition and disorienting mirroring suggest that, for the artist, this mental landscape is impossible to escape from. Read more
- Charles Avery
  
  Charles Avery projects outside his immediate reality to construct an alternative island ecosystem complete with inhabitants who have their own history, culture and society. Despite being placed in different locations within the gallery, Avery’s drawings and anthropological sculptural artefacts suggest that his imaginary world has a logic and cohesiveness lacking in most people’s perceptions of their own lived-in world. Read more
- Thomas Hirschhorn
  
  Thomas Hirschhorn draws on a collective memory that stretches further back than the beginnings of his own art career to the dawn of art itself, in the first cave paintings at Lascaux. Hirschhorn’s own multi-chambered cave, constructed from packing tape and strewn with soft-drink cans and philosophy books wired up to what looks like dynamite, hints at anxiety for a potentially explosive future for both society and culture. Read more
- Bo Christian Larsson
  
  Bo Christian Larsson’s multiple personalities manifest themselves in totemic objects that flit between the sinister and the shamanistic. A giant coil of rope, a black cat cut in two and boots made from chains provoke narratives of both protection and harm. Read more
- Mark Manders
  
  Mark Manders's room has the surreal charge of being inside and active dream. Sculptures of Buddha-like figures merge into furniture, an effigy of a dog lies on the floor, a mouse strapped to its side with a leather belt. That there is something both slippery and serene in these objects implies that the identity of the artist is also perhaps intentionally kept out of reach. Read more
- Yoshitomo Nara
  
  Yoshitomo Nara regresses back to his embryonic artist self, recreating his student bedroom-cum-studio in the gallery within a wooden shed. But, like the figures Nara paints, there’s a malevolence underlying the initial cuteness. The sign outside reads ‘Place Like Home’, implying that perhaps this never quite was the cosy environment Nara wanted. Read more
- Jason Rhoades
  
  Jason Rhoades’s installation initially suggests a mind in chaos, with its sprawling arrangement of electrical and office equipment, furniture, TV monitors, chopped logs wrapped in porn and a machine that blows giant smoke rings. But closer probing reveals that there is a logic and a careful labelling to all this messy activity and that Rhoades is merely reflecting the emotional complexity of life. Read more
- Pipilotti Rist
  
  Pipilotti Rist's dreamscape is of the floaty, trippy kind. Projected stars of light swirl across moving images of disconnected body parts and a looping, female voiceover whose sing-songy proclamations include: 'You are a butterflower, you are a mammal, you are a molecule.' Strange but celebratory, this is a mind that's both grounded and not afraid to let go. Read more
- Chiharu Shiota
  
  Chiharu Shiota weaves a complex tangle of black wool loaded with the symbolism associated with the web – an enclosure that can both nurture and entrap. That Shiota places a circle of five suspended, ghostly white dresses in place of a maternal spider at her web’s centre indicates that something has sucked the life out of these females and that these husks are all that remain. Read more
- Keith Tyson
  
  Keith Tyson’s mind seems to be constantly forging new synaptic connections in an ongoing investigation into the stuff of the world and his own place within it. Floor-to-ceiling framed paintings of text and images question, describe and categorise, and, like the sculptural figure representing Tyson as a curious child at the centre of this installation, this is a mind for which no amount of information could induce overload. Read more
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