The first subject matter for painting was animal. Probably the first paint was animal blood. Prior to that, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the first metaphor was animal.

- John Berger, “Why look at animals?” in About Looking (UK: Vintage, 1992) 7

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Since we began painting, people have always depicted animals. Warm, pigmented viscera daubed onto the rocks at Lascaux, Bhimbetka, and Altamira—bison, deer, and boar, still visible up to 30,000 years later. Many of these earliest depictions are hunting scenes, possibly forms of hunting magic, part of rituals performed to ensure a bountiful hunt and a safe return. Totemic images of cats, wolves, and birds appear in Egyptian reliefs—animals held sacred, their godlike status conferred by bestowing animal heads upon human figures.

By medieval times, hunting scenes were rare, as they played little part in Christian legend, while totemic depictions were considered blasphemous. Instead, images of animals were symbolic, each one carrying a message, with many still resonant to this the lamb, a symbol of humility and a reminder of Christ’s sacrifice. Indeed, the symbolic role of animals was so significant that bestiaries—illustrated encyclopaedias of animals, real and imagined, usually accompanied by a moral lesson—became extremely popular, cementing the medieval Christian belief that every part of the natural world was a manifestation of God.

In Fief, Alex Mcfarlane paints decorative depictions of animals drawn from medieval art and architecture: a sombre winged wolf, an ambiguous curve of horns, a stylised dragon-like creature sprouting crucifixes from the tips of its strange head. Displaced from their own contexts—Mcfarlane’s source materials vary from illustrations in books and images found on Tumblr to her own photographs taken while travelling in Europe—oddly cropped and rendered in textures and hues far removed from their original forms of metal, wood, and salt, these creatures take on new qualities. Detached not only from their animality, these are creatures unmoored from time, their medieval mantle shaken loose, no longer bound to the metaphors originally ascribed to them. 

This ambiguity is inspired, in part, by Aleksei German’s epic film, Hard To Be A God (2013). Despite being set on a far-off planet, German’s film appears to take place in the Middle Ages, for the Renaissance never occurred on the planet of Arkaner, dooming its human inhabitants to perpetual violence and squalor. For Mcfarlane, the film represents the past meeting the future, something that also seems to be occurring in our present day as billionaires, multinational corporations, and tech moguls gain seemingly absolute power, mirroring the dominion enjoyed by the lords and sovereigns of the Middle Ages. 

 John Berger writes that what distinguishes us from animals – our capacity for symbolic thought – is born of our relationship with them: we turn animals into symbols, into metaphors we then use to make sense of an uncertain world.[i] Animals were the first metaphor. As the past meets the future, it seems likely they will also be the last. 

 Alex McFarlane (b.1996, Ōtautahi / Christchurch) is a painter based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She graduated with a BFA (Hons) from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2018. Recent exhibitions include Extraordinary Contact (Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, 2024), Nina's Dance and Tipping Rail (both Artspace Aotearoa, 2022) and Parakeets (Satchi&Satchi&Satchi, 2022). Her work has also been featured in publications such as Venomous Feathers and The Spinoff. 

Text by Lucinda Bennett

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