This piece was made using roast lamb , the sheep had fed on the shores of Wastwater- the area depicted in the image. It was installed on the back of one of The Mountain Goat Buses which toured this areas, as part of Fred 2006 – a large art invasion across Cumbria during October. My thanks to The Mountain Goat Bus Company, who gave me the advertising slot free, for 6 months.
It is a continuation of the ideas behind Roast Beef. My ideas here are not so much with the use of local lamb per se, but to use it as a way of highlighting our relationship to the landscape: how we view it, experience it, consume it, interact with it and feel about it. I am struck by the immensity of this landscape: incredibly beautiful, massive in size, iconic in status. By re-making it in model form, I started the impossible task of somehow getting to grips with the landscape, of taking hold of it, carving it out for myself and possibly getting closer to it. Growing up on a beef farm, my dad being a wholesale butcher, has totally informed this work
It featured on the BBC 2 series “Show me the Monet” in 2011, for which I was interviewed by a panel of judges. Though I reached the final ,and exhibited the work at the Royal College , it didn’t sell.
[vimeo clip_id="36656893"]I then hung it on the wall of my local butchers’s shop, Steven Maskill in Hebden Bridge.