The Feral Memorial

This work consists of 81 out of an intended 400 completed pencil drawings of the ears and forelock of a horse. This work specifically considers the non-evolutionary history and existence of feral horses (known as Brumbies) in modern Australia and was prompted after reading the following extract from Alfred W. Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900.  

“The brumbies were pests, sweeping past and carrying tame horses off with them… “a very weed among animals.” […] In the 1930s when bounties were offered for horse ears … one man shot 400 horses in a single night.”

The chapter containing this extract prompted me to envisage not only what 400 pairs of feral horse ears would look like, but also to imagine the mass of carcasses left by this individual’s act of slaughter.

With this work I sought to explore human attitudes towards animals that exemplify the ‘shaped’ ecologies of contemporary, post-colonial global environments. The ‘Brumby’ represents one such animal which has left its mark on the landscape and ecosystem/s of Australia. The Brumbies—feral descendants of escaped horses brought to Australia by the English in 1788 and 1795—divide opinion. Seen by some as a pest (damaging natural flora, creating habitat loss for indigenous species, causing soil erosion, and damaging farmland), and by others as a symbol of national identity and cultural heritage: like the Mustangs of the USA, deserving of a rightful place in the landscape of Australia. Brumbies, therefore, represent societal ambivalence toward an animal that has adapted well to an environment in which it did not evolve and/or in which its evolution was accelerated.

The Feral Memorial is a work in progress. When completed, it will consist of 400 meticulously drawn images. The time-consuming process of making the represents a form of ‘atonement by proxy’ through which wider thoughts and legacies of colonial history continue to be filtered. Through exhibitions in facsimile form—on three occasions in the UK and once in Australia in 2011 the work has consisted of up to 400 wall-hung A5 size cards. The cards are printed with thick black borders, reminiscent of funerary stationery from the 19th and early 20th centuries.  

In 2014 I exhibited The Feral Memorial for the first time as the collection of 81 original drawings in my exhibition Unnatural Causes at the O3 Gallery in Oxford’s Castle Quarter. This gallery is unusual in that it occupies a split-level space inside a former tower of Oxford Castle which dates from the 11th century, and was used as a prison from the 14th century until 1996. When it was part of the prison, the Gallery space was used as a dayroom, though the adjacent room was used for executions. The close proximity of exhibition and gallery to the space of violent punishment and death was the main reason for choosing to exhibit The Feral Memorial, which makes specific reference to the practice of culling Brumbies in Australia from the 19th Century onwards. In making this exhibition as intervention, I was imaginatively connecting acts of punishment and annihilation of so-called deviant human and animal subjects—both by humans. The destruction of life as a way of supposedly putting right social/historical errors or wrong-doings of the colonial past, turns an animal such as the Brumby into a ‘pariah species’. Such a phenomenon prompts moral projections by humans onto animals, which further anthropomorphise our relationships to plants and animals in the contemporary Anthropocene. A further thematic and historic reference in siting The Feral Memorial within the space of a former prison, is the transportation of human criminals to Australia from 1787 to 1868. Brumbies are the descendants of the first English horses to be introduced to the continent. Similarly, the oldest, most established (and sometimes wealthiest) of Australian families, are the descendants of the criminals transported in the First Fleet—with both horses and convicts arriving in 1788. Perhaps this coincidence offers one explanation for the genuine ambivalence felt by contemporary Australians towards the Brumby.