MARGATE ARTIST JACK HIRONS ON THE CULTURAL ENORMITY OF CHICKEN

Almost like the modern-day Pandora’s Box, once you open the bargain bucket of chicken, you can’t ever close it. It’s almost disturbing just how much the popular poultry has infiltrated every aspect of modern life, from the arts to religion, and even into high-level sport. Chicken… you’ll now see it everywhere.

Margate artist Jack Hirons (@jackhirons) has just finished a spring exhibition at the TKE Studios in the town entitled Look At All These Chickens, displaying years of work that forms his Bone Black project.

Jack’s work explores the relationship between material and depiction or, perhaps, an object and how that object is portrayed in the world.

Bone Black is a series of paintings made using a pigment produced by the artist from chicken bones, charred and then ground into a black oil paint.

“The monochrome works become a dialogue between image and truth, painting and object,” he says.

The collection of images - anything from a pair of roast chickens on display in Morrisons to a scene from the 1996 movie Space Jam - have recurring themes that Jack says “start to reflect different elements of our own existence: politics, faith, power and sexuality”.

His chicken paintings having been exhibited regularly, from Bone Black #001 at Backroom Gallery, London, in 2019 to Round the back of KFC, by the bins, at Crate Project Space, Margate, last year, we felt it was time we got in touch to find out a little more.

What was your entry point into the art world?

Ha, well I’m still not sure I’m in the ‘art world’. I’ll let you know when I think I’ve arrived.

I came to make art via photography, basically. I never took art at GCSE or A-level but ended up taking photography at A-level and there was this great teacher who really engaged me with the making of images and especially lo-fi analog stuff - very tactile but you didn’t need to be able to draw. From there I studied photographic arts at university, which was a really expansive and engaging course and then from there I guess I found myself looping back and picking up painting for the journey.

How would you describe your style to people who haven’t seen it?

Black and white but also not very black and white.

You focus on a singular subject, examining the relationship between depiction and actual object/material - how do you choose your subject?

I think in previous work like Silver Loop it was really about focusing photographic images and by default that made that about silver. Other times it’s working out what can be used to make an image and what that means for our experience of it, but ultimately it’s about transformation and something being in the state of an image at this present time.
And in the most recent case, how and why did you choose chicken as the subject?

This came from a conversation in the pub. A friend told me the number of chicken wings eaten in America during Super Bowl weekend. That, teamed with the knowledge you can make a black pigment from bones, seeded the idea and it snowballed from there.

Were you surprised that chicken has so many avenues into popular culture, politics and religion?

Yeah, and it keeps coming. It shouldn’t be surprising, I guess, as they outnumber us by four to one at any given time and the iconography is everywhere. But yeah, people are now coming to me with their connections to it or they come across something a bit bizarre connected to chicken and send it to me.

Tell us about Bone Black and what it’s all about.

Over the years I’ve been working on Bone Black, it keeps becoming about something else - each image I choose to paint in the bone pigment adds something else to the conversation. Whilst explicitly it’s all about chickens, implicitly it’s about us humans. And really the transformation from chicken to something else, painting in this instance, is something we can reflect on.

Chickens are often the battleground for animal and farming welfare arguments - has this influenced any of your thinking behind the images?

Totally. You can’t escape this - some of the paintings very directly reference the mass production of chicken. I wouldn’t say I myself or the work is waving any banners about it, though, as most of the bones for the paint have come from chicken I have eaten. It’s somewhat contradictory for sure and I like that. In fact, I like that the work is confused or hypocritical - as it is made from chicken itself, it doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

Do you have a favourite piece among the collection?

Proper cliché, but it’s hard to pick a favourite as they’re all important to the project in some way. BUT I do like the ones that have humour to them. So for that reason I’ll pick the two chickens in the hot-food counter and the Space Jam triptych - they give me a lot of joy right now.

Is it right you now have a studio at TKE? How are you enjoying the space? What have you got planned there for the rest of 2023?

Yeah, my studio is now within TKE. It’s an amazing thing to be part of - the energy within it is different to other studios. It’s busy and there’s ideas and discussions being exchanged all the time and it’s expanding my work for the better, that’s for certain.

The rest of 2023… it’s gonna be more chicken paintings for the most part and I want to get a stick in the ground on an ambitious piece of work that I’ve had in my head for a long time.

Previously, your ‘Utopia, it’s down here somewhere’ project also looked at the human relationship with material (specifically mined materials) - what was the motive behind it?

Utopia was a commission that ran alongside a conference on sustainability and mining down in Cornwall and I was asked to produce something that responded to that. I had previously listened to a podcast about mining stickers, weirdly, so I knew about this culture of miners collecting stickers for their helmets. I pinched that visual language and produced a set of stickers addressing some themes and thoughts around mining and material. Conceptually it’s different to my other work as there’s no focus on one material.

INFO: https://jackhirons.com