The Waiting Room

"The Waiting Room" is a one-off piece made specifically for the entry into the Luxembourg Art Prize Competition. The work incorporates 2 therianthrope bronzes, a Bat Eared Fox and Spotted Hyena, on a base of jumbled steel 'L' shapes.

The hyena is the last available casting of 'Survival" and so this work cannot be repeated.

.Apart from the thematic thread of myth and therianthrope, this work relates more specifically to the concept of (female) “survival”…both in the animal world and human society.

Bat Eared Foxes, with their enormous ears (to scale in the sculpture), so acute they can detect the movement of small prey below the surface of the ground, symbolically embody for me a hypersensitivity to the world, an acute intuition.

The hyena is regarded by many as a macabre and repulsive creature that has to scavenge for survival (despite the fact that they are skillful and highly organized hunters in their own right). I see the fascinating social structure of Spotted Hyenas as a metaphor for our own in some ways. Although theirs is a matriarchy, all females have a fake penis, so elaborate they are actually capable of erection.When they give birth this fake penis splits and one can identify those that have whelped by their scarred organ. This bizarre evolutionary narrative seems almost a parody of our own gender dynamics in some sense, where highly capable women are still required to use masculine tactics to assert themselves and achieve agency, where gender automatically predisposes one to certain roles.