In the bronze maquettes of gorillas, Fairhurst developed upon motifs originating in his early drawings. One bronze gorilla gazes up to heaven; another has been flattened into a rug; another dolefully contemplates its own detached arm. At once anthropomorphic and darkly inscrutable, the figure of the gorilla fascinated Fairhurst with its potential for both cartoonish humour and melancholy.

Several of these choppy surfaced bronzes exist in large-scale versions. Close to the exhibition, on permanent display in Waddesdon’s grounds, is a majestic bronze gorilla hoisting an enormous fish under one arm, A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling; the maquette version is on display in the main exhibition. Fairhurst explained that he “wanted to make a classical sculpture that has the lightness of a cartoon. The relationship between the gorilla and fish is ambiguous, one represents thinking and the other represents feeling. One begins where the other ends”. This notion of a something at once ponderous and comically light also emerges from Undone, a giant bronze banana which sends up the idea public sculpture.