Dazzle — Metal-Flake Cartoon Horse, Racecourse, Newmarket

Racecourse members are not a sentimental audience. They know exactly what a horse looks like, they spend their lives looking at them, and they have seen every monument ever cast. That is what made this commission interesting.

The brief

A cartoon horse at the parade ring, about 2.3 m, that would not look like a trophy. The aesthetic reference the client gave us was not sculpture at all. It was the paint on a well-kept vintage racing car.

Cartoon proportions on a racing animal

A racehorse in full stretch is a collection of straight lines, which is the opposite of what a cartoon wants. So we kept the stretch and changed the joints. The neck is longer and deeper than it could be, the head is oversized, and the legs are extended further than the stride would actually reach.

The effect is a horse at a moment that never quite arrives. Standing next to it you can feel the pose asking to complete itself, which is why people walk around it rather than stopping in front of it.

The paint, which was the whole job

Candy metal-flake is a three-stage system: a metallic base, a translucent coloured coat over it, then clear. The flake has to lie flat and evenly, which means the flake coat has to be sprayed wet enough to flow and dry enough not to sag, in a booth with no contamination at all. We sprayed eleven test panels before we touched the sculpture.

The result is a surface that changes as you move. From the members’ stand the piece is a solid deep racing green, and the gold flake only appears when the light hits it at a shallow angle, which on a racecourse is most of the afternoon.

In the ring

It stands at the entrance to the parade ring rather than in the middle, so members pass it on the way to look at the real animals. The obvious joke has been made several hundred times by now, and the racecourse says it has not stopped being funny.