The Thousands

Brendan Huntley is an animist – someone who believes that inanimate objects have souls. But he’s not a hippie – he has a garage rock band called Eddy Current Suppression Ring. By now you’ve probably heard of them – they are loud, popular and a power for good. To recap then, he’s not a hippie but he believes in the deep immanent souls of trees and rocks and, most especially, jugs, teapots, gravyboats, cups and other domestic vessels.

Huntley’s gods have given him special communion with the ceramic objects associated with the mid-twentieth-century tea service – previously these rites were performed by your nanna but these days things have gotten so bad it’s fallen to unwashed rock’n'rollers to maintain our connection with the Domestic Holy.

Huntley’s animistic practice channels the divine to better understand the mundane. Only Human – or as Neitzsche put it, Human, All Too Human – lets lumpen clay, wrought by cruel fire and brought to crude limping life by their glazed and coloured faces, speak on our behalf. The inanimate explains what it is to be imperfect, mundane, fearful, lustful, joyous, soulful. Human, all too human.