Hot Chips & Cigarette Butts: Phyllis & Fergus

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Series: Hot Chips & Cigarette Butts

Completed: 2024

Materials/Details: Acrylic Paint on wooden panel, finished with matte varnish. Though the work comes unframed, the edges are finished in a crisp white & it comes ready to hang with a saw tooth hanger.

Size: 12x12inches & 1.5inches deep

About:

This series came to me through funny hypothetical conversations I had in my household with my husband & children.

The first conversation was between me & my husband. I was deep down a rabbit hole of pondering why we, as a human race, settled on eating the animals we eat. Why, for example, do we eat chickens but not seagulls, was there a moment in history where someone ate a seagull & it didn't taste very good? What if in the future, resources become low & we have to eat seagulls, what would they taste like? So I asked my husband what he thinks seagulls taste like & in his infinite wisdom & without missing a beat he said 'Hot chips & cigarette butts.' and I lost it laughing.

The second conversation was at the dinner table. We had a pack of 'conversation starter' cards that asked thoughtful questions to discuss (like when the kids can't remember what they did at school) & on this particular dinner the question asked was 'If you could be an animal, what animal would you be?' and my 9 year old son Kobe, relayed to us how he would be a seagull, but as himself now (so a child sized seagull) flapping around in the sky. He went on to say that when people saw him flying in the sky they would point & exclaim 'Whoa, would you look at the size of that seagull!' This is a moment with my family I wish we had been recording because I will never remember exactly how he said it, but we were all in tears of laughter because the way he expressed this idea was so comical. Kobe also does a great impression of a seagull.

Those conversations in combination with the fact I am 43 years old and, as my husband would say, become a bit of a bird nerd in recent years, had me noticing seagulls even more than I had before. I've come to realise seagulls are quite funny & with the hilarity of those conversations bouncing around in my head, I felt like reframing these attitude filled 'pests' into something fun was worth doing.

As intended, this motley crew of birds is full of sass, ass, attitude & expression. Each has been named with a delightfully ill-fitting name from yesteryear just to make them seem even more unhinged than the name 'Hot Chips & Cigarette Butts' suggests.