In this work, I constructed chicken figurines, arranged as if dancing on a factory conveyer belt, oblivious to their own extinction, removed from the land. The installation is in a dark room with ultraviolet light under which most chickens find themselves daily. They are symbolic of the human race’s own demise. The chickens are faceless and feetless, exactly the way we know them best. Devoid of feathers, heads and feet, they fit into each other like vertebrae, interlocked and connected, linking them together as the earth’s ecology is linked.

The more I sculpted them the more they started to resemble human forms until they became us – as we are dancing headless towards our own extinction. As hybrids, combining humans and animal elements, they make one conscious of one’s own body and that of the animals we slaughter and eat. Our ecological instability is depicted by the slant slope in the plinth. Only one chicken, slightly removed, looks in the other direction as if it wants no part of this.

My sculptures are concerned with ecological awareness and are intended to act as messengers to convey our fragile existence on earth. There is a definitive way in which my installation serves to further explain the concept, especially my work “Fast forward: Rewind”, where the idea was to convey and contextualise factory farm conditions. 

The influence of bonelike shapes in my work is very prevalent as it refers to our mortality.

I am fascinated by the idea of spiritual rebirth (Karmel, 2020). The final sculpture forms suggest my own subconscious idea of the chicken form becoming stronger than the real figurative form of the bird, as the work ends in an egg, symbolising the possibility of rebirth of consciousness for all