Russell Hackney - Ceramic Art
Bowen Island, BC

The Last Confirmed Sighting

At the beginning of 2023 I set myself the challenge of undertaking an ambitious embossment project. I didn’t yet know what that might look like, when early one morning, walking along an area that I had come to call ‘the thought corridor’ (in the Bowen Island forest of my home) - I was reflecting on a recently read article which told of the threat to the lives and habitat of polar bears. Though I knew of this threat (they have been in our collective consciousness as the ‘poster animal’ for issues and articles around climate change) - I found myself once more saddened. As I walked, a jarring image came to my mind, that of a polar bear, with the head of - or wearing the head or mask of - the extinct Dodo bird.It was to me such a strange, captivating image.I began to look at the International Union for Conservation of Nature website, the 'Red List , (also known as 'The Barometer of Life’.). Established in 1964 the Red List of threatened species has evolved to become the world's most comprehensive information source on the global extinction risk status of animal, fungus and plant species. I began to draw animals that ‘were endangered' or 'critically endangered’ according to the list, in various entanglements with the dodo mask or indeed where the dodo head seemed to have become ‘part’ of the endangered animal - replacing the head that had been there. Some of the animals on the piece are seemingly 'wrestling with their fate'. There is some mystery to me, in this shedding of the mask, this fighting not to wear it. I don't entirely know why I have given agency to some of the animals in the story of their existence - it's a deeply fanciful thought.I read of other animals that had been driven to extinction through hunting or habitat destruction and I read more of the fate of the Dodo.The last confirmed sighting of the Dodo bird was 1662 on the island of Mauritius. In 1889 the naturalist Henry Brydon wrote about the ‘Quagga’ a subspecies of the plains Zebra that was hunted out of existence. An animal that was so prevalent and so old that they were painted on cave walls.He wrote:“That an animal so beautiful, so capable of domestication and use, and to be found not long since in so great abundance, should have been allowed to be swept from the face of the earth, is surely a disgrace to our latter-day civilization’.I have tried to catch some of the original jarring image that struck me on that walk, in ‘The Last Confirmed Sighting’. I see it as a reminder of our connection and responsibility to the natural world as it memorializes one fellow creature that became extinct. In its memorialization of a fellow creature that became extinct, this work is a reminder of our connection to, and responsibility for the natural world.