I’ve been meaning to make this work for some time, so I’m really pleased that I made the effort to start yesterday and very pleased with the result. But what is it? Well its definitely art. Its definitely sculpture. Its not a pure ready-made. I bought the walking stick poles at the Weeton Show in Wharfedale in 2023 (thats how long this idea has been in gestation) and I bought the ‘cane toppers’ from various online sources a few months ago. They are all solid brass, quite heavy and surprisingly well made. I had to deploy my best wood working skills to make them fit – as with most projects, the practical work didn’t actually take that much time, but there was a lot of time spent researching walking stick, walking stick handles and cane toppers.

As you can see, the three cane toppers represent the three animals in the title of the work. There is no egg. One reason, eggs don’t seem to make good cane toppers. Two, three is a nice balanced number and three, well I already have a chicken…..

And as for the title, which inspired the work., it comes from a ditty my Dad started to recite on a childhood car journey. He had a habit of reading out signs and this was from a sign at a farm entrance, a farm selling Chickens, Ducks, Pork and Eggs. Memory is inherently fallible, but I’m convinced he repeated this ditty on numerous car journeys.

With my PhD researchers hat on, this work could also be about ladnscape, about journeys, about social mobility, about family but ultimately its very autobiographical and its really about my Dad. Roy Tranter, 1935-2021.