... Yeadon has played the 'cello since he was 12, but this is the only instance he has introduced anything remotely musical as a theme in his art. He became formally fascinated by the eccentric shapes of viols and other early string instruments, the varieties of species, all now extinct. [The only survivor of the viol family is the double bass]. Every possible shape, every twist and turn, every variation on this formful organic theme seems to have been tried but then lost. Yeadon developed a 'false' history to the violin. The violin he sees as the evolutionary winner, the perfect finished object, all the others suffering mass extinction. His comparisons of these instruments and the naked male body, Yeadon says, should not be taken too seriously, this 'comparative anatomy' is something of a joke. The anthropomorphic violin, with its neck, shoulders, ribs, belly, back belly, saddle, butt and tail piece, as in the print 'Names of the Different Parts'. Here Yeadon is not making an aesthetic point, rather, these are visual puns and a 'queer' response to Man Ray's Le Violon d'Ingres. 1999

"The completion of that liberatory project is perhaps the last remaining item on the agenda of the modern. The weapons in the hands of the revolutionaries are irreverence, wit and the infinite subversiveness of pleasure. John Yeadon's humorous taxonomies of musico-phallic objects are located centrally in that continuing revolution." Will Barton [from Humorous Taxonomies of Liberation.]