Big Mouth – an installation in Tramway 2, Glasgow (April 16th – May 31st 2004) The work used the example of the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger to examine human behavioural response to the unfamiliar, to fear and how acts of identification by means of comparison with what is familiar, can often be expediential, fateful and irredeemable.
It is understood that the thylacine as a species was used as a scapegoat for poor returns on sheep farms in the colony of Tasmania and as a consequence a bounty was offered in return for dead specimens. It was by this means that the extinction of the animal was rapidly accelerated.
A dog like story… In 1936 the last officially recorded thylacine died in captivity in Hobart Zoo in Tasmania, the country where they last lived wild and where over a period of forty years, they were systematically hunted to extinction by British colonial settlers.
It was recorded that its keepers knew this last known, living animal as Benjamin. However this was later proven to be something of a myth. In fact, this was the name of the last person officially to photograph it. On ‘its’ death she was identified as female.