Pit is Captured and Taken to the Pound, 1998
Graphite, gouache, and watercolor on white Strathmore Bristol board
29 x 23 in (73.6 x 58.4 cm)
© Sue Coe
Scene 16 from The Pit. The Pit series and the book Pit's Letter describe the journeys taken both together and separately by a boy and his dog. The boy grows...
Scene 16 from The Pit. The Pit series and the book Pit's Letter describe the journeys taken both together and separately by a boy and his dog. The boy grows up to be a biology student and a scientist; he and the dog are unwillingly parted; they will meet again, but only after the dog has become a laboratory subject and the scientist has been fatally infected with a "hot" virus. The cycle depicted in Pit's Letter pays homage to William Hogarth's "The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751)," a series of engravings that were made, in Hogarth's words, "in the hope of, in some degree, correcting the barbarous treatment of animals, the very sight of which renders the streets of our metropolis so distressing to every feeling mind."
Literature
The Pit series (as Pit's Letter, the publication of the exhibition's works) is mentioned in the essay "This Coward Cruelty: The Activist Art of William Hogarth," which appeared in the Voice for Ethical Research at Oxford, Mar 2022
Publications
Sue Coe, Pit’s Letter, 2000
Sue Coe’s The Pit: The Tragical Tale of the Rise and Fall of a Vivisector and Selections from Porkopolis exhibition catalogue, Gallery of Contemporary Art, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR, 2000, cover