The Fountain of Youth, the spring or river whose waters restore vitality to anyone who drinks or bathes in it, is one of the most persistent myths, equally in Western and non-Western cultures. This legendary place is the physical manifestation of the human desire to arrest time, to grasp control in a world of decay. Pursuit of The Fountain represents fear, faith, desire and the lust for power.

In a contemporary world experiencing the effects of rapid technological advancement – where the promises of many tech giants already appear as magic or science fiction – our most powerful elites no longer place their faith in the conquistador discovering The Fountain in uncharted lands: the modern day immortalists are searching for divine power within technology.

The Fountain I’ve depicted is a violent, desolate and precarious one. The centaur form – the hybrid – built from human, animal and technological bodies represents the reality of the human assemblage. In opposition to The Singularity being the final step in human ascension above nature, here the entire process of evolution is in the encounter with the Other. Hierarchy has dissolved, and our entanglement is more evident than ever now that this suspended body has mineralised into one inseparable form.

Perhaps this is the site of the first successful immortalists, or a shrine to the failed mission. Reflected in the watery threshold, the place appears to exist on the boundary between life and death: legacy’s immortalised in rock; ritual objects, both technological and biological, appear to be taking their first steps out of a primordial ocean, or succumbing to the flood that will return them to it; the only system truly “alive” is the machine scrambling to understand its physical world.