Margaret Thatcher may have been an inspiration and icon for Liz Truss and Penny Mordaunt, however the levels of appreciation surpass role model status. A puppet of the Iron Lady will be unveiled at a horror show in time for Halloween.
Somerset House will be featuring the infamous Margaret Thatcher puppet from Spitting Image as part of an upcoming exhibition at the London-based arts centre. It is the first time the puppet will be going on public display.
The puppet was designed by caricaturist and Spitting Image co-creator Peter Fluck and will feature in The Horror Show!, which opens on Thursday October 27. The landmark exhibition explores how ideas rooted in horror have informed the last 50 years of creative rebellion in Britain, taking visitors on a heady ride through five decades of counter-culture, the avant-garde and the uneasy.
Standing at just over 1 metre tall, the Spitting Image puppet will be housed in a cabinet of curiosities, titled “Misrule Britannia”. This exhibition sets a contextual backdrop of the dark shadow of socio-political conflict and tension that defined the 1970s and 80s in Britain.
The puppet was previously housed in Cambridge University Library’s Spitting Image Archive. It was cast from the original mould used by Peter Fluck for the famed television series.
The casting process was conducted by Fluck for the purpose of the archive, formed in 2018 when Spitting Image’s co-creator Roger Law donated his entire personal archive – which included original scripts, puppet moulds, drawings and recordings – to Cambridge University Library. With all original iterations of the Thatcher puppets in private collections, this is the first time a Spitting Image Thatcher puppet has made it onto public display in an exhibition.
The likeness of Thatcher features in The Horror Show!, an exhibition which looks beyond horror as a genre, instead taking it as a reaction and provocation to our most troubling times. The last five decades of modern British history are recast as a story of cultural shapeshifting told through some of our country’s most provocative artists.
The Horror Show! offers a heady ride through the disruption of 1970s punk to the revolutionary potential of modern witchcraft. It shows how the anarchic alchemy of horror including its subversion, transgression and the supernatural, can make sense of the world around us.
The exhibition's curators believe horror allows fears to be voice, giving people tools to stare them down and imagine a radically different future. Featuring over 200 artworks and culturally significant objects, the show tells a story of the turbulence, unease and creative revolution at the heart of the British cultural psyche.
The exhibition is split into three acts of Monster, Ghost and Witch. Each act interprets a specific era through the lens of a classic horror archetype, in a series of thematically linked contemporaneous and new works.
The Thatcher puppet features in the exhibition’s first act, Monster. It charts the ascent of individuals who would go on to disrupt, define and destroy British culture, while exploring the monsters which plague society today.
The exhibition's curators believe Monster revels in a resoundingly British spirit of non-conformity. The Horror Show! is co-curated by BAFTA nominated filmmakers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, plus Claire Catterall, who also conceived the idea.
The exhibition will have an accompanying programme of talks and events, full details of which are to be announced soon. More information available here.
