The Tale of The Cat Men

the cat men went viral grazing the eyeballs of some 17 million people when i posted their photo to twitter in september 2021 but the seed of their idea began much earlier when i was living alone in a van and noticed a dead cat on the side of the Nullarbor. i pulled over to get a closer look only to realise it wasn’t dead, just almost dead.

the almost dead cat lived with me in the van and slowly grew more alive again. the mouse who also lived with me in the van (and who raided my pantry each night and ran round and round in the ceiling cladding from 2-4am) at the first whiff of the new resident promptly left.

i remembered this lesson years later at my partner’s farm during a mouse plague in NSW. i wondered if cat hair could scare off mice and contacted The Cat Palace (a cat groomer in Sydney) who not only understood but enthusiastically told me about the ferret shit he’d plant under his house to scare away wombats. he supplied me with bags of hair as well as an unrequested bag of pads soaked in cat piss.

the hair and piss didn’t really work. i wondered if perhaps i ought to fashion them into something a bit more cat shaped like a hair and piss scarecrow and that was when i took up felting.

the hair and piss scarecrow didn’t work either but when i showed it to the cat groomer he liked it so much he commissioned me to make more.

my partner and i soon moved to Brisbane but i enjoyed making cats out of cat hair so much that when i saw an ad for an upcoming outdoor sculpture exhibition it seemed obvious that all i had to do to enter was scale them up a bit, to perhaps something human sized…

at the start of each month i’d make a pilgrimage to Aristocats Feline Day Spa where they’d happily hand over garbage bags full of hair. for the best part of 3 months i worked obsessively under our flat, elbow deep in the stuff, needle felting it into humanoid frames i’d constructed out of chicken wire (much to the bemusement of our neighbors and passers by).

suffice it to say the cat hair got into just about everything and some of my clothes were never quite the same again.

just in time i rushed the finished pieces over to a luxury garden resort to be displayed in the exhibition.. and that is pretty much how the cat men were born

nowadays they’re living out in Broken Hill at a gallery that was recently converted from an old pub, The Old Vic.

to read my original artist statement for Sculpture on the Edge click here–>artist statement

an interview i did with sensationalist uk rag can be read here –> metro article

a slightly more normal write up for a different us based publication here –>born in space article