08/03/2024
Nannup Tiger 2024.
What is the difference between the of a donkey and a goat? Obviously, one is a donkey and one is a goat……but just grab yourself a pencil and a piece of paper and try and draw the two in a way that clearly shows the difference. Not so easy eh? That’s the kind of challenge that I come up against all the time when I’m carving sand sculptures. It’s kind of cool because it makes you really look and think about specifics and subtle differences that make each animal unique. Fortunately there is plenty of source material you can use for reference .
But what about a Thylacine? The Nannup Tiger? What are the defining features that differentiate a Thylacine from a cat or a dog or a fox? This as the challenge I faced when I went to Nannup Music Festival last week to carve a sand sculpture for this years event.
It’s tricky because (at least according to most folks) the Thylacine has been extinct since 1936 so what limited photographic references are pretty old and grainy. It seems at the time people started to think about preserving a specimen taxidermy was not a high art form and lots of the images show some pretty lumpy attempts that would go well on Crap Taxidermy !
My plan for the Festival carving was to do a sort of parody of the His Masters Voice logo. You know the one? It shows an old gramophone with a cute little dog looking curiously into a gramaphone horn. I figured that combining a gramophone (source of music) with a Thylacine (parody of the cute dog and iconic Nannup animal) would be a great way to capture the essence of the Nannup Music Festival. I figured that having the Tiger, famous for its lean physique and it’s massive jaw, would add a kind of wildness to it like the alter-ego of the original dog suitable for the slightly feral Nannup. I decided to make the gramophone speaker missing a few mouthfuls where the Thylacine had chomped on it.
It was going pretty well apart from my struggles to capture the essential Thylacine. It really is a strange mixture of animals with its oversized hind quarters and it’s curiously stiff straight tail. I was fortunate enough to meet a local, Wendy Slee, who explained to me about how the Tiger uses its tail when it first takes off with a couple of hops like a kangaroo. So you’ve got a part dog, part cat, part kangaroo, part tiger? No wonder I found it hard!
Eventually I settled on a feel that I though was compatible with the feel of the festival and not entirely out of line with the multitude of Thylacine variations. I was about to start the festival logo …..when the top half of the sculpture collapsed leaving only the turntable of the gramophone and the tigers legs! Doh!!
After a few deep breaths and a cup of tea I got back to work. I guess one of the great things about carving a sand sculpture is that it doesn’t always go to plan….but it always goes somewhere. You can’t really just take your cricket bat and go home so it gives you plenty of “opportunities” to innovate and move forward in the face of adversity. I sometimes say “If something doesn’t fall down then I’m not trying hard enough.” In this case I turned the gramophone into a turntable, turned the tiger’s muscular shoulder into a snarling tiger face and the whole sculpture into a Thylacine DJ.
Ironically while the tiger tuned DJ was, for me, making the best of a sub-optimal situation (ie bad situation) most people who even noticed just assumed that I had finished with one sculpture and then built a different one. Some folks even said they preferred the second updated version!! I guess when your carving an animal that has been extinct for nearly 100 years nobody is REALLY in a position to tell you that you’ve got it wrong?
