“There is a sign of violence in all these figures in which an over-excited creature emerges from a lifeless shell. Here the artist precipitates his animal daydreams. Since they belong to the same type of daydreams, we must associate abbreviations of animals that have their heads and tails fastened together-the artist having neglected to show the intermediary parts of their bodies-with these snail-shells from which emerge quadrupeds, birds and human beings. To do away with what lies between is, of course, an ideal of speed, and thanks to a sort of acceleration of the imagined vital impulse, the creature that emerges from the ground immediately assumes its physiognomy.”

Gaston Bachelard
The Poetics of Space

Photograph: Paul Conneally, Loughborough, October 2023