Carey Voss was driving down a country road when she came across a scene that inspired her — dead commercial poultry along the roadside.
Voss, an art instructor at UCA, was trying to think of a way to create participatory art in a rural setting. While in New York and Washington DC, Voss used participatory art to express her frustration with those who failed to acknowledge the existence of people around them. The constant foot traffic on the busy sidewalks was the perfect venue for her art. When Voss moved back to Arkansas, her venues were limited.
“I was trying to think of participatory art without a pedestrian culture,” Voss said. “I was thinking ‘How do you interact with a car culture?’ “
Voss solved her problem when she came across the scattered dead chickens on the road. She began making “road kill” sculptures as a memorial for the dead animals she came across in her travels.
Voss uses biogradeable material — wheat paste, flour and water, soil and wild flower seeds –to make the papier mache “road kill.”
“I thought it would be neat to make something meant to be destroyed,” she said. “But, it also goes back to acknowledgment. How do you acknowledge that something existed?”
Voss began the project with chickens and eventually moved on to turkeys and bats. She recently completed a rabbit with tire tracks along its body.
Voss shows the original “road kill” sculptures in galleries. Her pieces are professionally photographed for documentation before being placed on the roadside.
The papier mache animal is placed in the area where Voss came across the dead animal that inspired the piece. She recently installed a turkey sculpture outside of Ozark, near Altus. She logs the GPS location in order to go back to see if the wildflower seeds inside the “road kill” sculptures germinated and produced flowers.
“I think I approach things differently than other artists,” Voss said about her work. “I feel like I have almost a Buddhist perspective in a sense that I see the artist as an observer. I am not trying to teach something. I don’t believe I am trying to make better people or moralize. I am just trying to observe. And, for myself, I am just trying to acknowledge.”