Damien Hirst

Trust is a sophisticated, semi-representational work of sculpture that addresses themes of charity, greed, and disability. Enjoying widespread recognition as the chief enfant terrible among the Young British Artists, in the early 2000s Damien Hirst employed his newfound financial resources to create elaborately constructed, immaculately finished works of sculpture of which Trust is an important example. It represents a robbery: a crow bar is opening the back of a charity donation box, one of the Spastics Society collection tins in the shape of a girl with cerebral palsy (fig. 1), and coins (attached to a burnished steel plate) are suspended mid-air as they fall to the ground. The implication is that this vulnerable young girl is being robbed, though it remains unclear who is culpable. As with much of Hirst’s art, the work itself appears to contradict or somehow undermine the concept evoked by its title. The crowbar offers a stark reversal, suggesting, rather than ‘trust’, distrust, conceit, vandalism and greed.

Trust was produced in an edition of twelve casts by the renowned foundry Pangolin Editions in Brimscombe, Gloucestershire. Hirst worked closely with them from early in his career until 2020; though he opened his own large-scale art production studio at nearby Dudbridge in 2006, he continued to use Pangolin for bronze casting. The edition of twelve relates to a colourful, large-scale, out-of-doors sculpture of the same subject and title. This work was produced in an edition of three ahead of Hirst’s White Cube exhibition, Romance in the Age of Uncertainty (9 Sept. – 18 Oct. 2003), where one cast was exhibited outside the gallery in Hoxton Square. The larger version has subsequently been erected in the City of London in 2015 (fig. 2), as part of the Sculpture in the City exhibition, and most recently, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2022-23.

Damien Hirst is reportedly a supporter of Scope, the cerebral palsy charity which originated the collecting tins in the 1960s and which was known as the ‘Spastics Society’ until 1994. In Trust, Hirst criticised the historic misrepresentation of disabled children as helpless and pitiful. By appropriating the questionable iconography of the Spastics Society collecting tins, Hirst creates a new context where it can be analysed and humorously debunked. Since the 1980s the representation of disabled people has diversified, emphasising instead the capabilities and unique identity of each individual. The charity Scope itself has publicly endorsed Hirst’s sculpture, describing it as ‘a symbol of changing attitudes to disability over the past 50 years.’

A key visual difference between the large- and small-scale versions of Trust is the treatment of the collection tin, cradled in the crook of the girl’s arm. In the large version, the tin is inscribed ‘PLEASE GIVE GENEROUSLY’ as in the historical collecting boxes. The small-scale version instead includes a caprice which quotes from Hirst’s signature ‘spot paintings’. This grid of spots, five by ten, helps to translate the collecting tin into the realms of art. Though the base of each cast is signed by the artist, the spots constitute a signature of another kind, making the authorship of the work instantly recognisable.

Much of Damien Hirst’s sculpture draws heavily upon strategies used by installation art. He variously softens and emphasises the framing devices which separate a work of sculpture from the space it inhabits, as well as introducing unconventional found materials such as rotting animal carcasses, children’s cuddly toys, cigarette butts or medical paraphernalia. Even when working with traditionally plastic materials such as bronze or resin, Hirst’s choice of imagery and the highly refined handling of materials creates an effect of the uncanny. In Trust, the model figure has at first sight a strangely life-like presence. An unsettling mood is created by the contrast between the statuette’s imagery and the whiteness of the cellulose paint finish, an allusion perhaps to the whiteness of antique marble sculpture.

Trust is an intelligent work of sculpture by one of Britain’s eminent contemporary artists. The combination of complex overburdened imagery, the translated figure of a children’s charity collecting tin, and the art object’s immaculate fabrication, so sophisticated that the materials and method of construction remain hidden, is compelling and altogether characteristic of Damien Hirst’s transgressive, often surrealist imagination.