I love this work, it epitomises my passion for creating art with nature to inspire people as well as the witty and irreverence of collage processes. Using collage to come up with the design- that is putting odd things together to surprise, laugh and transform ways of looking at things- I combined two odd things together, though both are feral critters. The feral cat face feeling pretty cranky and the Cat’s Claw vine that is prevalent in my local area.
The mobile is inspired by the trees where I live and the overwhelming task of keeping the weeds at bay. A weed is just a plant out of place, and it certainly loves it here, upstream on the Clarence River. When big old gums and black beans are a rarity, here such trees can be encased in this strangling vine called Cat’s Claw. It eventually strangles and kills these beautiful 200-year-old-trees that could potentially live till 500 years of age. Trees like this provide us breathe for life, health and well-being, besides being the essential life to many critters or a branch to rest by, for food or home for birds.
The work is a one-off mobile sculpture in copper, zinc, etching ink and wire.
I engraved the cat’s face into the hand cut-out zinc plate using the drypoint process and inked it up in etching ink. The stem, leaves, claws and seed pods were hand shaped and cut out with scissors (thin copper sheeting is easier to cut than thick 600gsm paper) The mobile is assembled using copper wire and suspended using steel wire.
