I legally bought all of my art supplies from government certified businesses. For instance, I bought fresh meat from grocery stores and preserved meat from companies which sold embalmed animal bodies for students to dissect.

These educational supply companies also sold dead animals to anyone who would pay for them. So I bought an embalmed chicken that was listed in a catalogue as:

Chicken. Embalmed. Arteries and veins injected with coloured latex. US$8 for one; US$86 for a dozen.

The chicken’s body was delivered to my studio in Vancouver where I dissected it, froze it, freeze-dried it and then placed it on top of a colouring picture of happy farm animals.

To the right of the dissected chicken was a chicken-dinner package that was shaped like a car.

Inside the package were three dead chicks that I got from a chick hatchery. The workers at the hatchery told me the chicks had been born defective so they were culled in a gas chamber. If I hadn’t freeze-dried their dead bodies and used them in this sculpture, the workers would have thrown them in the garbage.

The chicks’ bodies lay on top of the bones remaining from the take-away chicken dinner.