Desert Bloom

Extinction Denied is a collaboration between paper sculptor Stuart McLachlan and photographer Simon Cardwell. McLachlan hand-cuts and sculpts white paper animals and architectures, moon gates, bamboo scaffolds and velvet-rope barriers, then stages them inside co-created dioramas that Cardwell photographs at cinematic scale.

Up close the fragile paper and visible set-building clearly indicate these are manually constructed artworks. At a distance Cardwell’s photography translates it into a luminous, believable world that reads like a documentary scene from a future we might still choose. Across this new series McLachlan and Cardwell posit the argument that species pushed to the brink can be returned through sustained human care.

Three oryx move across red desert under a wide, clear sky, one of them caught mid-leap through a bamboo scaffold. The scaffold is the artists’ conceptual argument in symbolism; a temporary structure lashed together by hand to hold something up while it is rebuilt.

Of the three animals in this series the Arabian oryx came closest to being lost. It was declared extinct in the wild in 1972, hunted out with rifles and motor vehicles, and survived only because Operation Oryx had taken a handful of animals into captivity in the 1960s. The first deliberate releases were made into Oman’s Jiddat al-Harasis in 1982, from stock bred at Phoenix Zoo. In 2011, forty years after the species vanished from the wild, the IUCN reclassified it from Extinct in the Wild to Vulnerable. Around 1,220 now live wild across six countries.

McLachlan and Cardwell’s work honours this rejuvenation, and turns artifice into attention and understanding, which the artists hope becomes further action.