Why the horses?
The short answer is: I trust my instincts, I've found my gut reaction is usually right and I've put these horses in because I like them.
Partly it relates to the iconography of the horse through art history – a pictorial representation of a horse implies much more than just a horse. I can't think of any other animal that is symbolic of so many things: agriculture, war, travel, nature, strength, elegance, nobility, labour … I feel I can use the horses without necessarily suggesting a specific focus on horses. Not sure I'm explaining it very well, but it doesn’t matter.
Because overall I think the key association for me with horses is with the Texan desert, ranches and cowboys:
The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.-Cormac McCarthy – All The Pretty Horses
From the Dukes of Hazzard to the real, hard life of the cowboy – life in the southern states has always fascinated me. I think it’s the Puritan in me, I like the idea of the hard life being sought out in the desert, there's a lack of modern luxuries and where everything you've got you’ve worked for and know the value of.
Plus, I just like the aesthetic; baked dry landscape and the dust covering eveything, dragging it all down to the same muted colour scheme. Signage and billboards are sun bleached, chipped and weathered. The Hand me Down aesthetic I think I'm going to call it, where people are too poor for things to be disposable. They want to buy something once and for that to last them a lifetime – never mind if it gets a bit scuffed and frayed across the edges, they'll keep using it until it doesn’t work.
I like that.
And that’s why the horses.