T-Rex, 2008
Rupert Ackroyd

This sculpture's awkward shapes, if aligned correctly, would form a simplified outline or “cut out” of a dinosaur… specifically, the generalised shape of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Western culture seems to have adopted the T-Rex as a symbol, softening and anthropomorphising it over time to suit a range of entertainment and promotional applications – all of them a far cry from the animal's fearsome reality. The idea for this sculpture began to take shape at the time of public and media panic that surrounded an outbreak of avian flu at a well-known turkey farm in Norfolk, early in 2007.  At the time a food product known as a Turkey Dinosaur was popular.  Since the 1930’s and “Alphabetti Spaghetti” we seem to have found it compelling to dress food up as something else.  One manufacturer’s choice of a dinosaur shape for turkey meat seems unexpectedly appropriate in its circularity, which comes from the fact that dinosaurs are precisely the group of prehistoric animals from which birds descended!  On one level the sculpture might be read as a monument to the weirdnesses of marketing but it also stands as a simple, broken figure of a creature both close to us (since the T-Rex did once have a real, biological existence) and utterly separated from us… by its extinction.  The only life possible for it now is as an imagined being – almost a mythical one.  Since it must forever be mediated by our human notions of what it was like, this childishly visualised and deliberately unsatisfactory representation could also be seen as a kind of anti-monument… to the limits of the human imagination.  Alternatively, broken, flattened, simplified and rendered in the most pedestrian of construction materials (cast concrete) as it is, “T-Rex” might stand as a challenge to us to give the creature back, in our mind’s eye, its vitality and thrilling danger.