Stuart Bird is a sculptor, but accomplished in a variety of media; his work trades in visual puns and sight gags with bleak punchlines. Indeed, the idea of a punch is quite significant as his jokes are almost always about the intersection of masculinity, sex, violence and politics. Like a good punch, his objects can sometimes be hard to look at, visually aggressive, tramping a fine line between the controversial and offensive. Like a good comedian, it’s a fine place to operate. His particular aesthetic is encapsulated in his painted bronze series Zuma Biscuits (2007), which received widespread attention in the national press after it was first displayed on a group exhibition in early 2007.
“Do we have to talk about that one?” he asks. “No,” I lie. Nevertheless, Zuma Biscuits’s black humour and slick presentation are a good introduction. The work parodies a well known biscuit, Baker’s Iced Zoo, substituting its children friendly icons of animals with symbols – an AK-47, traditional Zulu shield, skirt and shower – representing contentious views expressed by Jacob Zuma around the time of his rape trial, in 2006.

A small extract from an article by me about Stuart Bird published in Art South Africa 7.2