Siberian Cranes

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.

A flock of cranes moves in low flight through the deep greens and blacks of old-growth forest, through a moon gate standing at the edge of the frame. The circular shape of a moon gate represents perfection, unity, and the cycle of life.  Passing through a moon gate is often seen as a transition—a movement from one space to another, physically and metaphorically. Moon gates are thought to guide chi (氣)—the life energy—through a space.

The eastern population of the Siberian crane is the species’ last viable one, the western flock all but gone to historical overhunting, and its survival now turns on the protection of wetland stopovers along the migratory route, above all Lake Poyang in China. That work, led by the International Crane Foundation with partners across Russia and China, has lifted the eastern population from roughly 3,500 to 4,000 birds in 2012 to close to 7,000 today.

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