The Great Irish Elk

About The Great Irish Elk

2007-04-11T16:41:00.000+01:00

What first attracted me to the Great Irish Elk as a subject for a project was the story of it's rather comic demise, the image of a majestic stag with fantastic antlers bounding through the forest and getting caught between two trees, I can hear the reverberations in my head, like that in a Looney Tunes cartoon, I then repeat, and repeat, till the very last elk is gone.
When I wore the replica antlers for the performance, I did not modify my behaviour, they did. They dictated that I sought wide-open spaces, I was unable to do many things for myself and this changed my habits: what I ate, how I socialised, my movement and posture. Friends were kept at antlers length, I found myself unable to help or participate in anything social, I was side lined, ignored; despite my fantastical appearance. I became increasingly grumpy and resentful of my art.
I appeared as a ridiculous highbred deer-girl, lonely, roaming the city, avoiding forests and alleyways. But the impact of this piece is not, I hope, merely comic. The metaphor extends to the human race and its imminent decline; our brain capacity grew very quickly owing to sexual selection; females selected mates with the trait of creative intelligence. But now we are using this intelligence to our disadvantage and will perhaps destroy our habitat and ourselves. We cannot see it but our brains are as big a handicap as the elk’s great antlers.

In all animals where runaway sexual selection occurs the male is ornamented or has some special adaptation designed to attract a mate, the female however remains dowdy but camouflaged. She is the one who does the choosing, the male just looks pretty and dances; destined to become an object with just one purpose.
In humans however things are somewhat different; in western cultures the male predominates and objectifies the female, the females modify their bodies and faces with makeup and clothing (and now surgery) to attract a mate. The male seems to do this to a far lesser extent and remains dowdy but camouflaged.
In this piece then, a female human wears the accoutrements of a male Irish elk, transposing more than one notion and creating a pleasing chiasmus of ideas.
Contained here is a collection of images, information and prose that I have come across or created while researching the Irish Elk project.

Gothic Revival Elk

2007-03-02T00:42:00.000Z

at the Natural History Museum, 28th feb 2007, with thanks to Grace Dickinson

2007-02-05T18:19:00.000Z

getting a beverage after hours of trying

2006-12-18T11:56:00.000Z

This is a film of the Great Irish Elk's second outing into town... I'd been trying to get a drink in a cafe or bar, but nobody seemed to want to accommodate me. Eventually, after about an hour or so, I found this place. The elk would be condemned to a diet of fast food and Coca-Cola

2006-10-19T14:52:00.000+01:00

Deviant Art

This is the news article that was on Swedish national news.

the abbots bromley horn

2006-09-27T22:36:00.000+01:00

On the 11th of September I went over to Staffordshire with my mum to visit the village of Abbots Bromley and the 'Horn Dance' that takes place there every year, and which I had heard about through my research for this project. Here are the photographs.

the horn men getting ready for a dance in someone's front garden

dancing and spectators

one of the light painted racks resting on the floor in between dances

the dance: light vs. dark

the fool's bauble, an inflated pig's bladder on a stick.

Pain and Loneliness

2006-09-27T22:35:00.000+01:00

The Antlers Installed

2006-07-29T17:41:00.000+01:00

The antlers were mounted in the gable end of the pump house to evoke the display of Great Irish Elk antlers in Scottish and Irish castles. On the walls below I hung 6 photographs from my self-portrait-as-elk series.

In the foreground is a sculpture by Hugo Sterk

What does an Elk have to do to get a drink in this town?

2006-07-29T15:23:00.000+01:00

On the 20th of july i took the G. I. E. peice out for the second time to meet the press and to try and get a better reaction from the disinterested people of Trollhattan, here are the photographs.

By the time I had met the journalist and had my interview I was parched so set off to find a beer, the photographer followed for a while, but after many unsucessfull attempts to get one, it bacame apparent that it was going to take ages so they buggered off. In the end I settled for a can of coke and a swedish pastry, that I ate sitting on a bench in the main square. One of the many drunks in Trollhattan parked his bike right in front of me and went to get a kebab, when he got back he was supprised to see a girl with elk horns in the way. He really hadn't noticed me at all. I was perplexed; hadn't I made them big enough?
Even on a major festival day the people of Trollhattan were at best noneplussed, but mostly they were just vaguly interested.

Checking out the secondhand shop called 'Yesterday', unfortunatly the other secondhand shop 'Spunk' was closed.

I had trouble fitting through here: by the time I got to the bridge I was exhausted, my legs just wouldn't crouch so I had to go through on my knees, it hurt.

A much needed cooling down session, but once I was down I had some trouble getting back up. It was a bit precarious.

in search of the wild elk

2006-07-29T15:03:00.000+01:00

I went on a trip up to the arctic circle before the beginning of the Deviant Art Festival in search of wild Elk and Reindeer, unfortunatly i didnt see one or the other.

(Crossing the arctic circle line by train: the piramid on the right is the marker)

The closesnt i got to any sort of deer was this treestump in a Bodø front garden covered in reindeer antlers:

before the performance

2006-07-29T13:56:00.000+01:00

Putting the antlers together in the gallery

The antlers in the back yard ready to be chopped up and packed up.

Elk televised on swedish national news!

2006-07-19T13:27:00.000+01:00

Go here to see me negotiating the mall doors on the news!

http://www.tv4.se/vast

and here for the local news artical (in Swedeish) for Trollhattan and Vannersbourg:

http://www.ttela.se/?article=24701

the same article as it apeared in print

Sedgwick was serious about his Elk

2006-06-20T23:19:00.000+01:00

My memory was playing up; I had forgotten that there are 2 Great Irish Elk in the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge. One is a whole skeleton the other just the head. But I don’t understand because it was my favourite museum when I was younger. I must have been much too interested in the huge Iguanodon fossil to notice such fripperies.

The Elk's Progress

2006-06-06T20:40:00.000+01:00

These are some stills from a short film that i made of the unfinnished headgear.

Lopsided Extremity

2006-06-06T20:18:00.000+01:00

Why?

2006-05-15T23:46:00.000+01:00

When the last ice age finished, around twelve thousand years ago, relatively quickly a great forest grew to cover most of Europe and Scandinavia. The giant deer’s habitat of open tundra disappeared and it would have attempted to survive in forests where the danger of getting caught in branches while running from predators was high. Because of the speed at which the forests grew, natural selection for smaller antlers did not have a chance to occur.
A process called Runaway Sexual Selection was responsible for the outlandish and useless size of the horns. Runaway sexual selection posits that extreme male traits (such as the male peacock's tail, or the huge antlers of the Great Irish Elk) can evolve through a process in which the male trait and the female preference for that trait become genetically linked. The male trait does not necessarily have to be beneficial to the male in any way; all it has to do is to attract females. In the case of the Great Irish Elk the extreme trait coupled with a sudden change of environment resulted in their extinction.

The Conceited Stag

2006-05-15T23:01:00.000+01:00

Once upon a time there was a stag with splendidly long antlers, who was very conceited. Every time he drank at a pool, he would stand and admire his reflection in the water. "I am handsome," he would tell himself. "There's no finer set of antlers in the forest!" And off he would prance. Like all stags, he had long slender legs, but folk said he'd rather break a leg than lose a single branch of his splendid antlers. Poor foolish stag! How vain he was.

One day, as he gazed peacefully on the tender shoots on some low branches, he heard a distant shot. He heard with fear the baying of the hounds. Terrified, he knew what terrible enemies the hounds were and that, if they caught his scent, it would not be easy to outrun them. He had to flee at once, and as quickly as possible. Faster and faster, he sped along the woodland track, his heart in his mouth. He could hear the baying of the pack at his heels. Without ever looking back, he ran in a straight line, trying to shake off his pursuers. Then the wood thinned out into a clearing. "With luck I'll be safe now," he said to himself, running swiftly over the smooth ground. And indeed, the yelping of the hounds seemed to die away in the distance.

Only a little further now, and the stag would reach safety. Suddenly, as he swept under a tree, his antlers caught in the low-hanging branches. He shook his head desperately, trying to break free, but although he struggled, his antlers were held fast. The hounds were coming closer and closer. Just before the stag met his doom, he had time to think: "What a mistake I made in regarding my antlers as the best and most precious part of my body. I should have had more respect for my legs. They tried to carry me to safety, while my antlers will be the death of me!"

-Grimm

Description of events to take place in Trollhättan, Sweden, July 2006

2006-05-15T22:54:00.000+01:00

I wake up on the morning of the show opening and put on my rack of Great Irish Elk antlers, which measure 12 foot across and 3 foot wide. They are sculpted from Styrofoam and light enough for me to wear all day and move about in. They are a deep brown red colour from the rusty iron filings coating them. I fasten them under my chin with the leather straps, then attempt to have breakfast and leave the house… during that day I carry out any tasks that I have scheduled, including hanging my photographs in the galley, attending the private view and perhaps visiting a pub for lunch or going on a walk. I will be seen by the people of Trollhättan but I will not behave abnormally; just negotiate my surroundings as best I can with this considerable handicap. The performance will be documented with film and photographs.

After the private view the antlers will go on display in the gallery, hung either on a wall or suspended from the ceiling, but their position should bring to mind the display of mounted trophy heads of deer in the grand halls of northern castles (see Cadhir Castle below).

From the onset of the exhibition, there will be a film of a similar performance that has occurred earlier in London, exhibited close to where the horns will reside.
On an adjacent wall three framed, large format photographs will hang. They are self-portraits taken in the Cambridge Zoology Museum, the Museum National D’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and the Natural History Museum in London, photographed to look like the Great Irish Elk antlers behind me are growing out of my head.

L'Elk Parisienne, not to be used without permision.

During the exhibition’s two-week run I will edit the footage of the Swedish performance and put it on show along with the London film.

The Feasting Hall, Cahir Castle, Tipperary

2006-05-01T14:33:00.000+01:00

A real rack of Great Irish Elk antlers, put up to give the impression of a mounted trophy that the lord of the castle killed, what he won't tell you is that they were dug up round the corner and came from an animal that became extinct 12 thousand years earlier.

What You May Understand

2006-04-30T14:45:00.000+01:00

What first attracted me to the Great Irish Elk as a subject for a project was the story of its rather comic demise, the image of a majestic stag with fantastic antlers bounding through the forest and getting caught between two trees, I can hear the reverberations in my head, like that in a Looney Tunes cartoon, i then repeat, and repeat, till the very last elk is gone.
When I wear the replica antlers for the performance, I will not modify my behaviour, they will. They will dictate that I seek wide-open spaces, I will be unable to do many things for myself and this may change my habits: what I eat, how I socialise, my movement and posture.
I will appear as a ridiculous highbred deer-woman roaming the city, avoiding forests and alleyways. But the impact of this piece is not to be merely comic. The metaphor extends to the human race and its imminent decline; our brain capacity grew very quickly owing to sexual selection; females selected mates with the trait of creative intelligence. But now we are using this intelligence to our disadvantage and will perhaps destroy our habitat and ourselves. We cannot see it but our brains are as big a handicap as the elk’s great antlers.

In all animals where runaway sexual selection occurs the male is ornamented or has some special adaptation designed to attract a mate, the female however remains dowdy but camouflaged. She is the one who does the choosing, the male just looks pretty and dances; destined to become an object with just one purpose.
In humans however things are somewhat different; in western cultures the male predominates and objectifies the female, the females modify their bodies and faces with makeup and clothing (and now surgery) to attract a mate. The male seems to do this to a far lesser extent and remains dowdy but camouflaged.
In this piece then, a female human wears the accoutrements of a male Irish elk, transposing more than one notion and creating a pleasing chiasmus of ideas.
Contained here is a collection of images, information and prose that I have come across or created while researching the Irish Elk project.

The Hart of the Would

2006-04-14T18:44:00.000+01:00

Albrecht Dürer German, 1471 - 1528 Saint Eustace,
c. 1500/1501 engraving

The image above shows the moment when St Eustace sees the vision of Christ crucified between the antlers of a Hart while out a hunting.

" lock up ye daughters, lock up ye wives, horny yeomen four-by-three, for winter is a-coming–O; and so are we"

2006-03-29T17:49:00.000+01:00

These men rampage through the village of Abbots Bromley once a year on the first Monday after the 4th of September shouting the above statement. The antlers are from reindeer which are long since extinct in Britain, a small splinter was radiocarbon dated to around 1065. So unlike some sham Victorian revivals the 'Abbots Bromley Horn' is pretty damn authentic. Hey nonny nonny no!

A very old tradition

2006-03-28T02:44:00.000+01:00

This is one of over 20 modified stag-antler frontlets were recovered at Star Carr, a mesolithic village in yorkshire. The nasal and basal parts of the skulls had been broken away, the antlers lightened and thinned by scraping, the inside of the frontlet smoothed, and two holes pierced from the back. The site is carbon dated to 9,600BP.

It is possible that these frontlets were attached to a stake or structure as some form of trophy; but it is far more likely that they were intended to be worn as a head-dress in the manner of recent shamans of the Siberian Tungus, as shown here in an 18th-century engraving.

Cambridge Archaeology and Anthropology Museum

Beth met the Elk the Elk met Beth the Elk was bulgy the bulge was Beth

2006-02-17T00:44:00.000Z

Cambridge Zoology Museum

In these images I appear in front of Great Irish Elk skeletons in various museums to try and look like one of the specimens in the collection, it is an illusory concoction, a Great Irish Beth, alongside the monstrous mega fauna of giant ground sloth, African elephant and dugong.

Heaven Knows I Haven’t Tried

2006-01-30T12:59:00.000Z

You're out on a walk, your feeling sticky in the head like the mud that cakes your boots as you trudge along the tire tracks in the trees, the rustle of your jacket and the leaves surrounding you momentarily mask a fearsome bellow which echo’s around the wood, it’s a troubled din like a tenors recitative and a bitterns boom, you follow the sound with some misgivings, but just there, round the bend in the path, you see something is afoot, there he is, an apparition of the elk. Two full-grown men are protruding from either side of its head, they wave their arms wildly but are rigidly straight and not flopping down like their exhaustion seems to demand. They beg you for help, but holler with frantic fear when you approach because the beast they are atop has detected your presence. The elk lowers his head, paws the ground and starts to move in. You turn and start to run, but can no longer see what is happening, the men are shouting for you to run faster. Your legs feel thick and doughy, you were supposed to have been jogging and getting fit, but that never happened and now, now it really matters: you feel like this. The elk has gained and the shouting is more frantic, the hoof falls are loud on the hollow bracken soil. One mans voice hurtles towards you ‘get down’ he screams, and his chest and chin strike you across the back, you stumble, yelling, the muffled pain of body collision scrambles your feet and your hands touch the wet ground as you half fall and carry on running. The men are whimpering, ‘not again… owwww, fuck’ and the other man scoops behind your knees and you hurtle into the air, his jaw smashes on the heel of your muddy boot, and don’t know what’s happening. The sense of ridiculousness as your brain freezes an image in your head and then you’ve landed in a fir tree, sharp pain on your skin, struggle to see what is happening, the whimpers of the men show you that one has come detached and is lying lifeless beneath the elk’s hooves. And your stuck but the elk is gaining on you, slowly now, he knows you are caught, and you’ve realised, he needs a replacement, the remaining man is squirming and shouting for you to move. You're next.

2005-12-03T19:53:00.000Z

Here he is now, deep down in the ground. One day i will dig him up. One day.

He was the biggest deer ever to walk the dirty road to oblivion.

2005-12-01T18:35:00.000Z

He strode through the young forest hollering and snorting and tossing his impressive crown of antlers to attract a mate; they measured 12 foot across. The largest set of antlers ever recorded, on the largest deer to ever have lived: he was rightly proud. But as the trees emerged from the cold soil and the canopy thickened, his movement became more constrained. He was startled by a disturbance in the thicket and bounded forwards, dodging the trees the best he could, but eventually he overestimated an opening and his great many-pronged horns got wedged in the branches above. Struggling to get out he involuntarily wound himself up tighter and tighter, until hours of struggling took their toll, he slumped, exhausted, his great rib cage frantically tremoring as he breathed in the ice age air.
There he hung; his enormous body measuring 7 foot to the shoulder strained his neck to breaking point. He hung there for days, undignified, nibbled on by rats, until his life ran out of his body. The birds pecked at his eyes and the fox gnaws at his haunches. There his body rotted, suspended, until the flesh and tendons snapped and his bones fell to a heap on the floor his splendid scull and branched antlers still hanging in the boughs.

The last Great Irish Elk has fallen.