Linnéa Ryshke

An estimated 69 billion chickens were killed for meat production in 2018, making up the largest group of land animals killed for consumption. The vast majority of these birds are raised on factory farms and are bred to gain weight as quickly as possible in order to maximize profit. They have quadrupled in size since the 1950s and are killed much earlier— on average a mere 47 days into their 10-12 year life span.

In this work, I sought to acknowledge the 47 days lived by one of these individuals through ritual of making. I created a sequence of actions to do each day in order to create the work: drawing the chicken’s form on the panel, noting the day with a tick mark, covering over the drawing with a thin coat of paint, and then, when it dried, sanding the surface down. As the piece evolved, I came to understand it as an embodied gesture of sustained witness. As I gripped the panel tightly and pulled and pressed the coarsest sandpaper across the surface to dull the drawing, I felt the violence of erasure. As I scratched each tick mark, I was surprised at how few days had gone by and how many more to go. As I painted over the surface of the panel after each drawing, I obscured and preserved her body. As I brushed the dust from sanding into a container, I found I was collecting her ash. I made an urn for this ash to be displayed along with the painting.