For the past 10 years he has been subject leader in sculpture at Loughborough University. He was also inspired by the notebooks of his Uncle Jack, a print compositor whose device to speed the production of biscuits was adopted by Huntley & Palmer in the years before the war.A couple of years ago, he was making giant “still lifes” from timber and laminates – English ones with wooden crockery, cutlery and bottles, and Moroccan ones with oversize versions of the sugar hammers typical of that country.He would be better known, and his work more expensive, but for his ruthless habit of abandoning themes for new ones, instead of consolidating them – and for his devotion to teaching. In the 1980s he used discarded builders’ timber to make heavy, somewhat threatening yet absurd constructions, such as Walnut Holding Device and Conker Boring Machine – references to the megalomania of Victorian engineers and to the subsequent decay of heavy industry. Aubergines and chillies in seagoing vessels made their debut only four years ago, in a series of six of his sculptures called “South American Trade”.His work before that, although also concerned with mechanics and loading, was quite different. But the base is actually a storm-tossed vessel – recognisable to those who know Morris’s recent work as part of his cargo theme – and the bodies, as a few seconds’ investigation will confirm, are clearly aubergines. Pigs? Breasts? Whatever gave you that idea?Body Boat is one of three in his “Boat” series, begun last year as he approached 50. Another nuzzles its stalk into its neighbour’s soft flank.The sculpture’s title, Body Boat, is little help in deciphering what the bodies are.

One squashed on the bottom row wearily drops its snout – or is it its stalk? The one lying on top of it raises itself, as if expecting to have its back scratched. You can be just as confused by the sculpture of Moore, Hepworth or Caro without getting so much as a titter out of it.When the giggles subside, the eye focuses on Morris’s voluptuous sags and bulges – the weight distribution (to use a dry term) that occurs whenever nature wraps bulky organisms in sacks so that they can pile themselves in heaps without getting tangled up.Gravity, his sculpture wittily observes, tends to mould piles of fat pigs or piles of ripe aubergines in the same sinuous way. At first glance, it could be any of several different things The way out of the confusion is to laugh Many people do. Morris is not in the least offended.
Humour is rare in British sculpture. After all, as Wolf argues, “the place becomes the event”.Kate Mikhail.

IS IT a pile of pigs or a heap of aubergines? Are the pointy bits snouts, stalks or nipples? Is there a buttock or two in there?

Dave Morris’s five-foot-tall sculpture in Ancaster freestone evokes what artists these days call a “multiple response”. And does this treatment of the Ballroom mean that all spaces are potential works of art? If that’s the case, a reconstruction of my living-room, with an accompanying tape of all the arguments of the successive neighbours who have lived in the flat upstairs, would count. Twenty-four hours of this drip of constant noise would surely send you mad, particularly as the calm, empty setting should be silent and peaceful. At the click of a mouse, you can access information about the RFH and the artist, which includes his biography and examples of his previous works, and you can navigate the installation itself in true playground fashion.The constant light and looped sound of The Elsewhere, however, is exhausting after a while. But then, a walk around the exhibit is slightly unnerving, surrounded as it is on three sides by the bar area, the customers of which stare on impassively at the live entertainment before them. The space is vast, its towering white pillars calling to mind the impressive height and scale of those in Egyptian temples, its emptiness and noise accentuated by the subdued, adult presence of those clustered around its edges.Fortunately, there is an accompanying CD-Rom, being presented as an artwork in its own right, which does flesh out the rather bare bones of the exhibit.