The Lost Cow

Desacralised Cow

Traditional images of the sacred cow show her as the cosmos, as the goddess Laxmi. The artist has captured the desacralisation of the cow, and our lives, in the sculpture where the cow is now the receptacle for the plastic waste of the contemporary fossil base industrialization. The waste of fossil fuel, which is in the cow, is also in the air.

I think it is time to stop focusing on global warming, and instead start focusing on the pollution that is messing up the cow and the climate. Just as looking at the cosmic cow draws us to the largeness of the cosmic reality, the cow as a garbage dump should draw us to the waste creating, wasted, and wasting civilization we have become.

What we are doing to the cow we are doing to the earth, and what we do to the earth we do to ourselves. The cow has always been the mirror of the world we inhabit. And our world today is not based on the sacred cow as the source of nutrition, as a provider of renewable energy, and most importantly, the source of renewal of the fertility of the soil, and provider of our sustenance through food. It is a waste dump. The sculpture wakes us to this degradation and destruction. And it should wake us to take action to stop the pollution.

The painting of the cow in red brings to life the cow as a source of beauty. For me the hump of the indigenous cattle breed has always been an aesthetic feature I find missing in the flat backed crossbred. When I see the beautiful horns in the painting, I think of how cows imprisoned in factory farms have to be dehorned because in those crammed conditions they use their horns to harm each other. The cow in the painting has not been violated like the cows in factory farms. The proud elegantly dressed cow seems to be saying “I am beautiful in my integrity, I am still around, I will not disappear, and I will not be ignored, I will not be violated and polluted

Dr. Vandana Shiva