Four legs good

By LINDA HERRICK


When Angela Singer was a little girl growing up in Essex, she was a vegetarian from a very young age, figuring that if she loved her dog, it would not be right to eat a creature with four legs like her pet - or flesh of any kind.

"But Mum used to go to the butcher's every day and there were posters of New Zealand lambs, huge posters of little lambs, so I could see that people in New Zealand must eat them."

Sure enough, when Singer was 8, the family emigrated to New Zealand, land of the lamb-eaters, and she was confronted by a society where the meat industry drove the economy, and hunting animals was a recreational sport.

Rather than shudder and turn her back, Singer's strong ethical beliefs have shaped her lifestyle and inspired the art of the Elam masters graduate.

Her new show, Insides Outsides, at Auckland's Oedipus Rex Gallery, follows on from last year's Carnivora. That show flipped the hierarchy of prey and predator, pets and their so-called human masters.

Insides Outsides goes further, subverting the repulsive art of taxidermy - using the bodies of real, stuffed (usually pretty ancient) animals Singer has found in garage sales.

There's a tiny deer, Recovered, the trophy head different from the jewel and flower encrusted body it's mounted on, with "blood" spurting out of its neck. She found the deer body outside a house, being used as a shoe rack.

The little lamb, entitled Chilled Lamb, shimmers with crystals, a forlorn echo of the hundreds of newborn lambs which die each winter, encrusted in ice.

This is the second lamb Singer has decorated. The first was in an earlier exhibition opened by Helen Clark, who commented she related entirely because her farming background had included the annual chore of picking up the frozen lambs.

There's a hollow, white, furry animal Singer thinks was probably a cat, "a piece of home taxidermy done by a woman who didn't know how, for her kids". The paws have been snipped off, it has no face - "you don't really know what this animal is, she has taken away its identity".

Loaded with jewels, crystals and flowers, the show includes a duck, a pheasant, a thrush head, rabbit, kitten, ferret, even a tiny blue penguin's head. But doesn't this collection of stuffed, damaged, dead animals upset Singer, even though she has put her heart into giving them a purpose?

"It's a combination of beauty and repulsion," she responds. "I see the decorating ones as memento mori, mourning works, and the flowers are like the ones used on gravesides, as funeral flowers."

She finds the various methods of taxidermy strangely fascinating, in the sense of what people used to think they could do with animals - even stuff them amateurishly with shredded clothes and cotton wool.

"All the birds in this show - like the little thrush - someone has gone out there and thought, 'I'm a man, I'm going to shoot this bird and stuff it, and people are going to know I killed it. I am a success. I've killed.' It's quite strange."

Singer's work will feature in a book, Killing Animals, to be published by the University of Illinois Press next year. She is also included in Animal Nature, an international show at the Carnegie Mellon University curated by the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, and she will take part in an installation at the Carnegie Museum of Natural Museum in Pittsburgh, apparently home to the world's largest collection of taxidermied animals.

Singer says it is not her aim to convert those who enjoy killing animals for "sport" and she doesn't want to appear preachy.

But it's hard not to be affected by her bejewelled dead creatures, their glazed, bead eyes looking back at the species which kills them. But change is possible. Her pheasant, for instance, was given to her by a former hunter who has abandoned the practice and now hunts only with his camera.

"I will continue exploring the human-animal relationship," says Singer. "That's what I will look at throughout my life. I have a great empathy for animals and if you make something you love, the ideas will always be coming to you and you're pretty damn lucky, too."

* Oedipus Rex Gallery, Khartoum Place, to Sept 17

On the web: www.criminalanimal.org