Shhhhh....Im hunting wabbits...

After a successful trip, an early morning and four cups of tea i bagged myself two rabbits! After seeing the prices people pay for them in the butchers (£5! each) i have come to the conclusion that my housemates do not know what is good for them. The pictures you can see are made from the de - boning process. The rabbit is partially cooked, removed from the stew and te flesh carefully removed from the bone whilst watching your fingers. I particularly like these two images because there is something disturbingly human about them, the first appears to be giving up, almost exhausted. The second has managed to prop itself up
but is unable to use its back legs. Their fleshy appearance is reflected whithin my other sculptures through the mixture of clay, feathers, wax and bone.
These two were fully stripped, eaten and the bones boiled for four hours in lemon and vinegar to both harden and bleach them. The boiling process (lemon included) is to clean the bonemarrow from the inside and any persistant cartilage that could still be clinging on for dear life.
Unfortunaely i am in a hurry to go to work, tomorrow however i will go through preparing the bones properly for later sculpture work.

A series of unfortunate events

Its been a week or so since my last post, ive been away where its just not possible to maintain an internet connection for more than 1.5 of a seccond. I got home last night and my house mate had some bad news for me. Four of our pets had died (1 rat and two fish and my mouse) So no nice surprises. I have been thinking about getting a new rat as the cage of the remaining two is rather empty and its good to keep them in groups of two to four. I have gone into some detail about this to highlight the importance of observation and habit.
The animals i have watched (000h er...probably should rephrase that) have provided many of the ideas for my sculptures, their movements are full of patterns and their habbits are facinating (i wish i could get my toes into my ear to scratch the inside!). Be that as it may they are still living in the manner they see fit for themselves, guided by their instincts, much like ourselves. It is the fact that their behaviour is natural that has lended itself to my pieces. The simple actions of one of my rats washing itself captures the way it acts. My pieces are posed in such ways to reflect the baisic instinct of an animal and the frustrations of the human.
The photographs are some of the animals i have been using for my project. The rat is Dumbo, The dogs are Moss, Lucky and Guinness.