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Equine figure depicted in a controlled stance, one foreleg raised. Weight redistributed. The pose is commonly associated with vigilance, or command. Movement is suggested but suspended. The riderless body is rendered as solid mass. Such figures appear frequently within civic and national contexts. They have a bureaucratic function as stabilising symbols. Conflict is resolved compositionally, and time is fixed at a point prior to consequence. Organic form is violently translated into public material through processes of extraction, heating, and casting. The required to produce permanence is not registered within the final object. This horse and many horses functions are in ceremonial statecraft. In Ireland, the animal’s role within military infrastructure collapses distinctions between the pastoral and occupation. Roads, parades, and patrols rely on the horse to translate new states. Depicted on the Old Military Road, County Wicklow, this horse was deployed by British forces to secure visibility and rehearse dominance. United Irishmen, operating with intimate knowledge of the terrain, defeated occupying forces through guerrilla tactics that rendered mounted patrols ineffective. Following the British retreat, this horse and its peers remained in the mountains without a rider. Local populations did not reclaim the animals or remove their tack. Bridled and unattended, the horse continued to circulate through roads, bogs, and upland terrain until exposure and starvation resulted in their death. This condition parallels the administrative remainder produced by numerous other horses on their many hooved mission. Partitioning in particular, positioned between overlapping statecrafts, left equipped but unclaimed, bodies on land maintained without resolution.
The last starving horse speaks his last words through a bridled mouth.
I am a casualty of a war
that is being fought
between an oppressed people
and an alien, oppressive regime.
This statement does not belong to the animal, but it passes through it.
The horse is trained to carry language it cannot refuse.
Its body now becomes an interface between instruction and knowledge of its terrain.
The people respond in many ways, but not immediately.
Our revenge
will be the laughter
of our children.
An initial victory, aided by knowledge of their land, is displaced into futurity and these constructions are deferred into inheritance.
Somewhere in an archive, this exchange is misfiled and the animal is aestheticised. The battle is reclassified as history where nationhood is a split condition.
The archive records continuity where there is only maintenance.