"A Beautiful Shambles" - Dark Horse Experiment 2014
Here are some images attached of my recent installation "A Beautiful Shambles", the install included oil paintings, found objects, cutlery, traps, wallpaper of totems and prose, up-cycled timber railway siding boxes, LED lighting, furs, paste up artworks and much more. Below is a brief synopsis:
The treatment of Australia’s dwindling native fauna is erroneous to say the least. The Kangaroo, arguably the most well known of Australia’s marsupials is a reflection of this “beautiful shambles”. This symbiotic descent demonstrates mankinds irrational, destructable and single minded pshyce.
The protected Eastern Grey Kangaroo (Macropus giganteus) is currently valued at an estimated $20 per head. They may only be processed however if they are shot and killed with a single shot to the head.* An intriguing contradiction, protected, not protected, permitted, not permitted, killed, not killed effectively... Treated by many as vermin and culled on a magnitude that is indescribable legally and illegally(estimated 90-98% population reduction). These mammals are not even an “object of desire”, merely destroyed for destructions sake, culled and buried or dealt out as pet food for the masses to feed the animal minions.
This is not disimilar to the predicament of other Australian mammals which since the arrival of Europeans in Australia have suffered a higher rate of mammal extinctions (%10) than any other continent in the past 200 years. Seventeen species of Australian terrestrial mammals have gone extinct, representing nearly half of the world’s recent mammal extinctions.* After a lull of 60 years the new wave of extinctions beginning with the extinction of the Christmas Island Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus murrayi) has arrived with a further 35 mammals listed as endangered species. This wave of extinctions will be on a far greater scale than seen since the last great extinction. The so named “marsupial ghostlands”* of the southern interior will spread, the effects of which are unfathomable in regard to the symbiotic relationships that have formed and evolved for millenia between flora and fauna amongst these fragile ecosystems.
Make no doubt about it, the face of this continent is under enormous and seemingly irreversible change with the cries of the few going completely unheard by the many. This is the Holocoene Extinction Event.