This body of work began in 2009 and was the direct result of a commission for the Southbank Centre in London – a socially engaged participation project to accompany the exhibition Walking in My Mind at the Hayward Gallery, London. Setting himself the task of co-authoring a single object with six young people, Hornby devised a computer-aided system to combine their ideas by intersecting the participants’ extruded drawings, evenly rotated around 360 degrees. Parts of each contributor’s drawing, converted into three- dimensional form, could thus be viewed from different angles as the viewer moved around the sculpture.

Following this project, Hornby replaced his young collaborators with key figures from the history of art, such as Rodin, Brâncus ̧i and Hepworth. The resulting sculptures were hybrids composed of partly identifiable and recognisable sculptures from the canon of art history. The first series was designed for the artist’s solo show Atom vs. Super Subject, which opened in London in spring 2010.

Hornby has since continued to expand and develop the series, exploring some of the many critical and formal lines of enquiry that this pioneering approach invites.