Nature Red in Tooth, Claw and Breakfast Nook

Bruce Gilchrist of London Fieldworks has sent me this image from their latest project, ‘Super Kingdom’, an installation of luxury show homes for animals in the ancient enclave of King’s Wood, Challock in Kent. This particularly forthright bird box for the unreconstructed masses is indentified by Bruce as the ‘Stalin’ show home – the deliberate inversion of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International being, one assumes, a particularly sardonic comment on the historical fate of the European avant-garde. Similarly, their Mussolini bird house contains echoes of EUR, otherwise known as fascist Italy’s Third Rome.

In every dream home, a mantrap: in the past animals have usually shown more taste than humans in their choice of habitat. Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson have a subtle way of reminding us that we’re really not that much different from the beasts in the field – we simply have bigger weapons. Go to the LFW gallery page for more images.


‘Super Kingdom’ opens on Sunday September 21 and is a Stour Valley Arts commission and is free to the public and open at all times. But you’d better go in disguise.