'Tyke's Freedom'

This piece is a linocut print, lightly inked to create an echo of the grainy newsprint photograph from August 20th, 1994, which inspired the image.

The components of the work weave together the narrative of that day, from the perspective of Tyke’s lived experience as a prisoner.  Stolen from her family as a child and forced into labour for humans in an alien environment, her body and her dignity were brutalised constantly for over 20 years, and she bravely made many attempts to escape.

Honolulu sits top left, a city on the ocean, traumatised that day by the killing of a wild animal on their streets.  An elephant, who should have been free on the other side of the world.  Just visible is the ship which brought Tyke and all her other oppressed elephant companions on an arduous four day sea journey, just for the so-called entertainment of humans.  

When Tyke ran that day, she metaphorically broke the chains which had bound her to that life, and smashed the weapons which had been used to control her. 

The STOP sign has many meanings.  As she ran through that city, terrified and already carrying many bullet wounds, all she must have wanted was for the constant pain and horror of her existence to stop.  Her escape, and subsequent murder, became a catalyst for calls to stop the use of wild animals in circuses.  Animal rights activists have called for this heinous use of animals to stop for many years, and the arguments are as worn as the stop sign on the tarmac.

Perhaps this brave elephant still dreamed of her short experience living free and innocent, and of the vast, peaceful open spaces of her birthplace.  If she could have chosen, there is little doubt that this is where she yearned to be, and would have run to if she could.  The Mozambique Tree Aloe at bottom right greets her back to the homeland, and her family rest in the trees, awaiting her return.

The 87 bullets which took her life are now doves, bringing her back home.

'The Unheard Screams'

This piece interprets an image of a dragnet, used to catch huge quantities of marine animals in one operation.  The target species is shrimps, but there are untold numbers of fishes here who will be thrown back into the sea, or ground up as ‘fishmeal’.  They will be either dead already, or will soon perish from their trauma.

For a while I’d been wanting to make a piece of work centred around what is termed ‘bycatch’ in the fishing industry.  Online there are plenty of descriptions, and many estimates of the horrific numbers of marine animals - those who are not the ‘target’ species - being caught in nets across the world.  These animals suffer terribly in the process of being trapped, only to be thrown overboard when the ‘catch’ is reeled in and the fishes whose bodies are commercially viable have been extracted for processing.  Most of the ‘bycatch’ will either be dead already, or will slowly perish once discarded back to the sea, due to the physical trauma of being trapped with millions of other bodies.

In my research, I started to see that most data I was reading, and certainly all the concerns I saw from environment and animal welfare groups, related to protected species, or those charismatic animals such as mammals, sharks and rays, dolphins and whales, turtles, ocean-dwelling birds, or ‘cute’ species like seahorses.  

The much revered BBC programme, 'Planet Earth III’ recently featured a section on anchovy ‘fishing’.  The point of interest for the film focussed on the sea lions who gather to take advantage of the nets of writhing fishes as they are being reeled in.  Great empathy arose from the filming crew as the mammals were seen to be caught in the net, seemingly without means of escape and in danger of suffocation.  A heroic rescue ensued.  Hearts were gladdened.   But right there next to them, by the film’s own admission, were over a million individual fishes.  Caught in a giant net.  Crushed, terrified, suffocating, dying.  The narration even stated: “The anchovy* panic.”  Yet their intense suffering was utterly overlooked.

*Using the singular term for a number of any species, such as ‘anchovy’ rather than ‘anchovies’, serves to deliberately depersonalise the individual.  This was NOT one anchovy panicking.  It was a million anchovies panicking.

There is a vast disconnect between feeling empathy for iconic species, while completely ignoring the absolute terror in the fishes and crustaceans - the target species - being caught and killed in those nets in their trillions annually.  That is something that humans need to critically examine in ourselves.  They are just as worthy of our empathy as any other species.  They feel too. They suffer just like us.  We can’t hear them scream, and we’ve been told for generations that they don’t feel pain.  But it has been scientifically proven that they do, and that they live complex and rich lives.  It is way too easy to ignore their suffering simply because they function in a physiologically different way from us.

Photographic evidence shows these nets being dragged in with millions of terrified beings inside each net.   They are crushed and torn apart when trapped in the centre of this vast weight.  They are asphyxiated, gasping for life.  Their organs rupture as they are brought violently to the surface from great depths.  Their eyes bulge out of their sockets.  Any who survive this onslaught will be left to suffocate on deck, or they will be bludgeoned, decapitated or disembowelled while still alive.

TRILLIONS of sentient marine animals suffer and die this way every year.  We need to widen the scope of our empathy.

"LOVE THIS" - inspired by Gretchen Primack's poem

All farmed animals across the globe have their reproductive systems exploited, in order to create more animals or have their bodily secretions to turn into edibles for profit. The dairy industry exploits the naturally occurring mammary fluids of the female, and discards or renders invisible every living component in the creation of that fluid.

The cow – MOTHER - is viewed only as a numbered vessel, to be forcibly impregnated in order to induce a flow of lactate which will be sold as milk. The offspring – CHILD - is by-product, taken away from their mother at birth and either killed or further exploited for profit, depending on gender. Bulls – FATHER – are the most invisible part of the dairy equation, living largely in solitary conditions completely at odds with their natural needs. All endure short lives of violence, commodification and oppression, and all this occurs behind pretty packaging and advertising with misleading and downright dishonest images of pastoral serenity.

So called "happy" or "humane" dairy is a lie, a marketing trick which we have all fallen for over years of indoctrination. The other animal lives behind the lie are kept from our consciousness.  All the cows and calves in this artwork were referenced from photographs of real beings, and all are now dead at a fraction of their natural lifespan, in the name of "dairy".