One of the very earliest of Tanning’s sculptures, Pincushion to Serve as a Fetish resembles no known form but, to quote the artist, is ’bristling with images’. Its curves, protuberances and orifices suggest a lively creature. But the white lines on the black velvet, together with the pins pushed into it, hint also at the operations of magic or ritual. Tanning wrote: ’A fetish is something not exactly or always desirable in sculpture, being a superstitious if not actually shamanistic object; and yet, to my mind it’s not so far from a pincushion – after all, pins are routinely stuck in both.’