The Thousands

Sydney artist Drew Bickford has been busy "breeding bastards". A man obsessed with inky manifestations of horror, gore and the grotesque, his recent work thrives within the breeding grounds of The Mongrel.**Painstakingly conjured by Bickford with ink on paper, fragments of monster, man and beast are Frankenstein-ed together to create finely-tuned telephone doodles that take an abrupt u-turn to the darkest pits of our psyche. The Mongrel can be seen as the impure, the imperfect and the afflicted, cursed with an eternal outsider status. Refuting genetic modification and the pursuit of perfection, Bickford however finds it is in this place that great power and acute awareness, beyond the polished and the predetermined, resides. The Mongrel, with all its suffering, allows for survival of the best kind.