Tong Chen
Masada College
EGG, BEAK, CLAW
Drawing
Drawing, print, pencil and ink on paper
All fragile beginnings brim with potential to be perfectly equipped for survival. My body of work is a compilation of drawings and prints exploring birds – their feathers, beaks and claws – examining how this potential can be fulfilled and how transformations and mutations may lead to the death of nature.
Marker's Commentary
Egg, beak, Claw is a creative series demonstrating an inventive, skilful and sustained material approach in the drawing and printmaking practice. A scratchy and fragmented approach to investigating inside and out echoes the marks made by the claws of chickens as they scratch around in the ground, reiterating the daily actions of the bird. The confident manipulation of drawing and printmaking techniques plays out across the multiple panels with the limited colour pallet creating cohesion and clarity in this carefully curated series. References to the scientific study and dissection of animals is made in the presentations of pieces of the bird, inside and out. Feathers, claws and beaks are overlapped, recorded and displayed as fragments of perhaps a future species unknown to us as yet. Conceptually, the imagery and representations evoke an understanding about data and observation records with the experimentation and engineering in laboratories of farmed animals.