Unsurprisingly, a deal of Perth’s abundant street art celebrates Western Australia’s own extraordinary flora and fauna.
Thanks to sculptors and muralists, you can see kangaroos in the CBD’s main thoroughfare, endangered cockatoos vividly adorn more than a few walls and fences, and oversized orchids, kangaroo paws and banksias “bloom” on others.
Near to the South Perth foreshore’s colossal frill-necked lizard and numbat, proudly stands a singular, much more elaborate metal sculpture.
It was made in the WA wheatbelt, but depicts – anatomically correctly – an “iconic” African animal.
In Nuremberg in 1515 Albrecht Dürer created one of the most influential “animal artworks”, ever.
His woodcut is still widely-reproduced.
It was the (inaccurate) work of a great artist who never actually saw an Indian rhinoceros, nor any other kind of rhino; click here for more.
(true confession from yours truly: as a pimply virgin of circa 13 years, I imagined that my Dürer-illustrated “horny beast” t-shirt was sooo “out there”. Blessedly blind to its double-entendre – or, perhaps, just being kind to his silly pubescent son – my father cheerfully greeted me, “gidday, you ornery beast!”)
Jordan Sprigg’s “Sudan” was made on his family’s farm near Narembeen in 2020.
”Sudan” is now a South Perth restaurant’s “entry statement”.
Unlike Dürer, the West Australian artist knew exactly what his subject looked like…including its oft-attendant, tick-eating, feathered friends.
(Red-billed oxpeckers spend a deal of their lives “on board” rhinos. “Pest-control” is not the only service they provide. Click here to read about the birds’ role as “danger alert system” for their short-sighted, lumbering hosts)
Living examples of “Dürer‘s rhino” still roam wild parts of the Indian subcontinent, but Sprigg’s “Sudan” is elegiac.
It remembers the very last wild, male Northern White Rhino, who died in 2018.
Jordan Sprigg took around 500 hours to make “Sudan”.
The sculpture weighs more than 700 kilograms.
That is a deal lighter than most actual adult rhinos!
As is generally true of Sprigg’s oft-astonishing works, “Sudan” was fashioned from a hugely-eclectic array of “scrap” metal.
If you zoom in on/enlarge this post’s images you will see just how eclectic are this rhino’s components.
Click this to see the artist’s online gallery; if you then click any individual image, you can discover that beast’s particular story.
An ABC News story about “Sudan” is here.
