KEY POINTS:
Artist John Lyall's new show includes digital stills on a computer screen of him swimming underwater with two stuffed toy tigers. The tigers' spots give such good camouflage that when he lost one among the seaweed, it took him half an hour to find it. When he finally emerged from the water cradling the sodden tigers, a little girl on the beach complained loudly to her dad that "that man" was trying to drown them. She demanded that she should be allowed to rescue the tigers and take them home.
That's just one anecdote from Lyall's many years of making art with stuffed toys representing real animals and birds. Whether it's his digital portraits of them, street performances with them, installations or sitting in a window at Whitcoulls playing with his toys - which is what he did for eight days during last year's Auckland Festival - Lyall's creatures hook in the viewer.
"The soft toys are in a certain sense kitsch and fluffy and nice," says Lyall, "but that's the sugar coating for the bitter pill of extinction as the animals themselves become threatened and extinct."
The new show Birds, Cats and Dogs at Digital Darkroom is a collection of technically superb A3 digital prints on watercolour paper of five Australian "birds", three domestic "dogs" and four endangered "cats" - the white tiger, cheetah, tiger and the snow leopard. You know these are toys, yet the portraits are surprisingly appealing and poignant.
Take the snow leopard toy, which Lyall bought in Outer Mongolia during a research trip with his partner, Auckland University sociology lecturer, Dr Claudia Bell. With the wild population of the snow leopard estimated at 7500 worldwide, and in Outer Mongolia perhaps as low as 500, Lyall was disturbed to hear tales of Russian troops shooting the leopards from helicopters.
Later in Bosnia he saw a snow leopard coat in the window of a fur shop on sale for US$45,000. The endangered animal is simply a commodity.
Australian "birds" are in the show, Lyall explains, because "Australia is slowly losing its birds to loss of habitat and lack of water".
As he is Australian-born - Lyall moved to New Zealand in 1983 - that holds special significance for him. "My mother lived in west Sydney and she used to feed the birds. I grew up there and every day we had 50-100 rainbow lorikeets coming in to feed. She used to cut the fatty meat off the chops for the magpies and kookaburras and we fed them by hand. It was formative. Rather than naively becoming a bird watcher, I am much more political."
The "dogs" - a mad-looking great dane, a dalmatian and a basset hound - provide a more oblique element, neither endangered nor wild. "The dogs aren't as important in conservationist terms but they are important because people have pet dogs and they are in effect killing the native environment," Lyall contends. "We spend far more money on pet dogs than on preserving indigenous species. They don't photograph particularly well - I took endless photographs. It wasn't a matter of whether the dog looked good but whether it looked good in the photo.
"I wanted them to be formal head and shoulder portraits of fake toys. You could say it's quite pointless but in actual fact I am taking them extremely seriously because they not only stand in for animals but in reality, kids in New Zealand in their daily lives see fake toys or animals on TV. If you ask a kid in New Zealand to name a wild animal, they will say lion or tiger but most of them haven't even seen them at the zoo. They have seen them on Richard Attenborough so it's literally about that.
"The representations far outweigh our experience of the actual animal, which is probably in another country, probably endangered and even if we were there we wouldn't see it anyway."
Lyall has countless stories about his travels. When he and Bell travelled through the Balkans in 2005 and again in 2006 - he was in the 9 Dragon Heads International Environmental Art Symposium and the International Winter Festival Sarajevo respectively - he took photos of a toy kiwi in the Museum of Natural History, which had been looted by the Serbs during the Bosnian War. "Most of the cases were empty," he recalls. "So you have an empty museum with hall after hall of mainly empty cases. These things stand for sadness and loss."
Lyall's involvement with the Korean-based 9 Dragon Heads group has been longstanding. Organised by Park Byoung-Uk, the group focuses on environmental messages in art and usually involves about 16 artists from around the globe each year. Lyall will return to South Korea next April to create work on the Pacific coast called Fairyland, involving a Christmas tree, tiny models of New Zealand birds and a "tatty" fairy on the top. "Then I will stand the tree up at dusk beside the sea and take a stunningly beautiful picture.
"It's just what I do," he adds. "I'd like to say I give up art for minutes at a time. I am not a person who needs to spend a lot of time making work _ I spend an enormous amount of time thinking about the works. I might spend nine months thinking, then make it in an appalling rush because all of a sudden I understand it."
John Lyall
* Born Sydney, double major in sculpture, Bachelor of Fine Arts, Sydney College of the Arts, 1982.
* Moved to Auckland 1983, completed Master of Fine Arts, first class honours in sculpture, Elam, 1992-93. Winner Fowlds Memorial Prize for top fine arts student.
* Lyall has exhibited/performed in Sarajevo, Tokyo, Korea and Melbourne; works are held at Te Papa and Rotorua Museum of Art & History.
Exhibition
What: Birds, Cats and Dogs, by John Lyall
Where and when: Digital Darkroom, 273 Dominion Rd, Mt Eden, until Nov 14
