The Deer, the Bread and the Teeth

This year I have taken up stalking deer and have used my response to this in my art. Instead of sticking the antlers on the wall, I did the usual thing(!) and put them in bread. There is not much rationale for this, its just I like working in bread. It is useful for me to use the various bones, antlers and teeth from deer and play with them as, at the moment, I don't really understand my fascination for stalking.  Is there something instinctual, maybe, about me connecting with the hunter/gatherer inside me?
The first two pieces of work below are roe buck antlers. After cooking, the antlers became brittle and cracked on cooling which is why they look shorter, blunt and broken.

The next two photos are some red deer teeth I found in the woods. They look a bit comical but also rather sinister.

This is the lower jaw of a roe deer. It has 32 teeth, including 8 at the front  which look rather like feet!

From these works so far, what I have learned is to just be quite fluid and spontaneous while working with the materials and not think too hard or plan what I am going to do. The response to the lower jawbone took only 5 mins to conceive and 15 mins to cook and it is an interesting and intriguing little object.   I compare this with very lengthy planning and baking of my bread bodies over the last few years! 

Drugs!

This term I decided I would somehow like to embrace my 30 years as a pharmacist by getting drugs into my artwork. I felt that, after all this time, drugs are my language and that surely they would be able to influence my artwork?  But after playing around, it doesn't seem to be cutting it.  Not for the moment anyway.  It seems forced and too pre-meditated. Maybe having a certain material  to work with is not as important as having a process? And possibly because I have been working with drugs for such a long time, they have a certain place in my psyche? Not fluid enough.

                                           Sponge cake with ibuprofen tablets and capsules

                                           Various drugs in sponge cake mixture

                                           Beeswax 'scone' with various drugs



For the eca open day in October, I made a pretend drug cake, using paracetamol capsules in the traditional pharmacy logo. The title, Sig: 2 QDS,  is the way prescriptions are written, it means 'take 2 capsules four times daily'.

                                                     Sig: 2 QDS
                                                     Clay, icing sugar, paracetamol caps, ribbon

Collaboration

Over the summer, 2011, Roberta Buchan and I decided to collaborate on a piece of work for the 'Fabric of the Land' exhibition in Aberdeen.  Roberta is a printmaking student and was happy to respond to some latex pieces which I had been using to record the moulding and general decomposition of my bread body. Her response was a collograph. We called  them the 'dancing collographs' as she made the latex look quite dynamic.

                                           Latex piece showing bread mould and  zip imprint.

                                              Final piece 'Coming together, falling apart'


 I also made some other little latex remnants from the bread surface which made an interesting mobile.

                                                    Latex remnants from the bread body

                                             
We both felt there was a lot of learning to be taken from collaborating on a piece of work. I feel it is important to listen to each other, be flexible and not too precious about your own work. Its exciting too, when you spark ideas off each other and end up somewhere completely different to where you thought you were heading!