The Sacrifice (2023.14)

The Sacrifice, created on goatskin, represents a process of simultaneously aesthetic and psycho-spiritual alchemy. The memory had at its centre the feeling of something terrible. Having established a routine with his sister of going along to feed the same local goat every day, the two children were one day to discover a menacing dog hanging from the goat’s neck. ‘There were no adults around,’ he recalls, ‘just me, my sister, the dog and the dying goat. The work, supposed to be the artistic representation of a gruesome, bloody memory, unexpectedly filtered through a creative consciousness that is both aware of trauma having taken place and also concerned to inject an energy that is in some way healing, ends up being another image of post-traumatic ‘three-ness’: a serenely passive goat-deer, on its way, perhaps, to death; an observing canine consciousness, no longer necessarily the butcher of the scene, but instead, perhaps, its key witness; and a divinely human, self-healing collective, itself split (but reconnected) into three distinct consciousnesses. Some kind of cosmic alteration has taken place through the creative process, enabling ‘sacrifice’ to be averted, and communication to become possible. ‘It’s the piece people gravitate to most’, says Quiquine, ‘they seem to like its warmth.’