The Barbed Wire Emu

I mentioned to you earlier about coming across 40-odd different emus in a fence line one day, some of them had been dead for a week, it was a really bad drought about 10 years ago and some were on their last sort of dying stages. It was a pretty horrific thing for me to have to go along and put them out of their misery. There wasn’t much sense me untangling them and most of them weren’t going to survive anyway, or none of them were going to survive, so you just don’t like to see things suffer like that. It’s probably the hardest thing I had to do was go along and put them out of their misery. You would have liked to have been able to cut the fences down and let them all into the dam, but, yes. So those pieces, I quite enjoy doing them. Like I said, they’re life size and they’re made out of barbed wire, the thing that kills them, so it’s almost like a regeneration or, yes, reincarnating them again. I don’t think I’ll ever get around to making as many as I’ve seen perish but. I grew up using barbed wire, fencing you know, and it’s one of them things, if you grab it by the scruff of the neck it won’t bite you but, yes, if you be a little bit tentative it always seems to get you. But just a solid week and a half or two weeks of handling barbed wire it’s inevitable that you’re just going to – it’s almost like sandpapering all the fingerprints off. So you need another month to get over them. Yes, it’s sort of like your little sacrifice that you have to spill a little bit of blood.

The artist Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award catalogue statement 2007