Splitting fields: Winter lambs, immiscibility, distorted reflections, and a kid’s moral compass.

I first saw the dog fences as a kid. Common as the early spring lambs lying frosted in the paddock, born too close to winter. I took this photograph in Bendoc a few days after one of those spring snows, and even though the day was sunny that day the air was crisp enough to hold the snow in low pockets. Days like that are the quietest.

This wild dog was killed by a local, he was the same size as me and incredibly beautiful. Most likely a border Collie bred with wild dogs, maybe a survived abandoned puppy hardened by the wild. They're strung up like that around the paddocks and mountains all around far East Gippsland and the snowy mountains where I grew up. Usually it's to warn people that they’re around, best they keep their kids and animals inside at dusk and dawn, also in the hope that the public crucifixion will ward off other dogs coming into the area. They're trophies too. On the school bus we’d see fences of them stretching on for what seemed like Kilometres and it always sparked debates about cruelty and morality in agricultural practices and the wider world. Conversations that made my head whirl as I tried to grapple with the prospect of violence being a byproduct of good intention: that evils don’t always stem from malice. There are many things that aren’t straightforward in the slaughter of harmful introduced species, especially those as dangerous as a hungry wolf, and as beautiful as a best friend.

These dogs have appeared in different forms throughout my practice, symbolic of the notion of holding two contradictory opinions at once - two contradictory ideas co-existing. To feel love and pain at the same time, forgiveness and betrayal, disgust and understanding, anxiety and confidence. I think it’s something that makes us messy and flawed. It helps me stay away from extremist views or going down rabbit holes in any one direction, when I remember that everything is contextual and has a lineage beyond what’s on the surface. Perhaps that also makes me non-committal and cowardly, but that’s between me and my therapist.

In psychology it is cognitive dissonance; and where one shields us from seeing that the pure existence of the dilemma is inherently wrong, George Orwell calls it double think. They speak to the double standards that we live by to uphold morality around our political identities, and the myriads of ways that we shield ourselves through reasoning to protect ourselves from the reality of suffering that occurs out of view. They speak to the violence that we are unavoidably complicit to by existing in the first world, by existing at all.

Big thoughts, the kind that take a lot of working through and revisting. Painting forces me to spend time with these thoughts and mull over what it is that makes me feel so strongly about it.

When I posted about this painting on my social media I was surprised by how many people I’d grown up with contacted me to tell me they recognized these dogs. So integral to the landscape out there, and everyone has a different story.

We have all learnt to exist with discomfort in our own ways.