In this piece my “Pattern Series” takes a
different turn. The series began with
animals hidden amidst abstract wallpaper-like backgrounds, progressed into
animals presented plainly in front of repeated images of the animals themselves
(in a manner bringing to mind Andy Warhol’s soup cans or Wayne Theobaud’s
confections), and then evolved into the animal subjects becoming a part of
those very patterns themselves. “Fox
& Bracken” is, on the one hand, a throw-back to how the series began, and
also something very new. Firstly, the
pattern itself, consisting of an arrangement of bracken fern, stinging nettle,
and elm leaves with samaras, is dramatically more complicated than anything
I’ve previously attempted. Secondly, the
fox himself, far from being camouflaged within that matrix, emerges plainly
from a hole cut straight in the middle of it. The pattern does act as a very
stylized and simplified stand-in for the fox’s natural habitat, but its very
artificiality suggests that the fox is intruding somewhere it does not
belong. Taken literally, he seems to be
poking his head into a finely wallpapered drawing room. It is not an unfair
reading, since foxes do have a habit of turning up where they are unwelcome
guests.

For my own part, the subject-ground
relationship is both elegantly comfortable and stylistically jarring, which is
of course the point. My work has, for
many years, been preoccupied both with the juxtaposition of illusionistic
elements and flat decorative treatments generally, and with the recontextualization
of wildlife from natural to unnatural environments specifically. While mankind has made much of the earth
inhospitable to wild creatures, there are those, foxes certainly among them,
that have adapted remarkably well to suburban and even urban environments. Not long ago I observed an especially
handsome fox in the middle of London devouring an abandoned remnant of
someone’s chips. Whatever this particular fox is up to here, I’m all in.