At times I think of my artwork as mending, a kind of labour of love. On my walks around Chants Hut I sometimes find old, rusty rabbit traps and once a dingo trap up Dog Trap Creek. The rusty jaws bespeak a hard life for the man on the land, and for the rabbit a hard death. The trap is a powerful metaphor for European misunderstanding and abuse of the land - 'the best-laid plans of man will go awry' and steel jaws will smash the hands of an incautious trap-setter. I dreamt of a work to evoke caution and a new hopefulness in land management, a shift away from 'biting the hand that feeds'. I forced the traps' jaws open, and welding them apart, I transformed them into cradles. The disarmed teeth now hold my delicate works of repair, the mended broken bones and shells of marsupials and turtles I found about Chants Hut. I acknowledge my debt to Bruce Coman, a research scientist with the Victorian Department of Natural Resources and Environment, in naming the work after his book Tooth and Nail, (Coman, Brian Tooth and Nail: The Story of the Rabbit in Australia, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1999). 'Tooth and nail' is a metaphorical expression to suggest a long and hard struggle, which is how men saw their battle against the rabbit, and even against the forces of the land. Simultaneously another struggle continued, a struggle for survival of the native species. My traps may be like cradles, but they still hold the potential of a trap that is set.
For me the juxtaposition of materials can build a poem of associations and meanings; ferocious steel traps become cradles; the clutching prongs of an exotic burr (Xanthium italica) become the binding force in vulnerable systems; a 'noxious weed' tussock rope becomes connective tissue for a fragmenting world.