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Showing posts from July, 2012

SMILE: One night In Peckham

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Taxidermy Puppet 'SMILE' O.k so here goes trouble.    Taxidermy has  exploded  in recent years and  this is something I created a little while ago.  Something I have kept under wraps because of fear.  What has the world come to? How far do we have to push the limits in life and death. . . . . What do we have to do to breath new life into an ancient art? Is nothing sacred anymore? Pointless shock and sensationalism seems to be the only way to get ahead these days. If you can't beat them, become the future. Animals are being exploited in art, fashion and on the dinner table. They are just another product of consumerism, freely available to use and manipulate for commercial gain. When they are of no financial use to us we toss them aside, their lifeless bodies left to adorn skips, furnaces and roadsides. Strangely, while people’s consciences are rarely pricked by vacuum-packed cuts in the supermarket, restaurant meals served with potatoes and jus, or cas

Crossroads photos from Secret Garden

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I arrived on site Friday afternoon 1 week before the festival started. My boxes of toys and materials were taken to a storage container and it was here that the magic would happen the following day. . . So first off I made quite a strange half man half deer half instrumentalist out of an old torso, chicken wire/feet plus a deer’s head that had been crudely preserved. On his head sits an upside down crow- like it just fell and died there, just like that. The body was tricky to put together. I wanted to make it quite animalistic so I used any brown materials I could find lying in the woods to create a shaggy beast type thing. He was me least favourite piece even though he took the longest. Just not my sort of thing if you know what I mean. It just wasn’t real enough for me- or just not scary enough maybe. It didn’t scare me in the same way the others did. It didn’t disgust me. I had brought an awful lot of chicken heads and feet with me.  In my mind I saw a terri