This piece features a ten day old male chick looking up at the heaven’s contemplating his lot. He would have never seen his mother; she will be caged a long way from where he hatched.
He stands on a pile of chicken bones which form a rough nest. The plinth is made from reclaimed wood which has been distressed and burnt. It is covered in Chinese money, and has leather on its feet.
The bones of 13 chickens were used to create the nest, they came from the carcasses of chickens cooked for Sunday dinners from Bristol to Birmingham. Thank you to all those who donated them. As chickens are consumed so voraciously and have a notoriously raw deal during their lives I was drawn to work with them again.
I create work that encourages people to enquire about what they are consuming and how it ends up on their plate or in a piece of my work, and perhaps to question their consumer tendencies a little.
This chick was sold in pack of ten, frozen, hopefully, after death and sold for food for birds of prey and reptiles kept as pets.
There is a huge amount of information on how chicks are farmed for the meat and egg industry but not many people seem aware of it. I find it increasingly strange how we are so unconcerned at what we eat, the tendency to take no responsibility for anything we consume is not something we should be proud of.
People often comment on how cute this chick is, they never question how or why it is there. These male chicks are of no use to those who profit from farming, as they can not create profit, they will not grow enough to be used for meat as they hail from a special breed created just to produce the greatest egg yield. They are small, to take up as little space as possible and cannot easily increase body mass, therefore they are disposed of after just ten days of life. Each year, approximately 30 million ten day old male chicks are ‘disposed of’ as waste.
Chicks are sorted by sex using conveyor belt systems, and either sent live into a grinder or put in sacks or crates and gassed, though I’m unsure if this is accurate, it would make more sense considering the brutality of the process to skip the gassing and put them straight in the freezer. My money is on the later.
Female chickens will go onto a life of egg production, after having their beaks sliced off by a machine to stop them pecking each other.
They will spend the rest of their short lives in either a barn, a battery cage or free range, which effectively is a over-crowded barn with some access to outdoor space in they are lucky enough to reach it.
It takes 3 kilos of grain to produce one kilo of eggs. This conversion of crops by farm animals into food for humans is grossly inefficient, it is not only food (grain) that is wasted. Each battery egg takes approximately 180 litres of water to produce.
Consider the volumes of water human beings use in developing countries: in India, for example, the poorest use an average of only 10 litres of water each per day (O’Brien, 1998).
Studies of farm animal housing have shown that egg farms have one of the highest farm emission rates of ammonia gas, a serious environmental pollutant linked to acid rain and the pollution of our water ways.
When working with the chicken bones I found a significant difference in bones from free range/organic chickens to factory farmed birds. The bones from the later were much smaller and more brittle.
Each bone is drilled and wired together to form a dense structure. There are no wish bones, how could there be luck in this piece? I’ve saved them all for another work. The collection of bones continues at a slower pace, they are so nice to work with, I love the texture and colour of them when they are displayed on mass.
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