Recon — Camouflage Cartoon Service Dog Memorial, Christchurch

Memorials for working animals are difficult to get right. Done literally they become sad, and a sad sculpture in a training yard is a daily weight on the people who work there. The centre had already decided against bronze before they called us.

What they asked for

A german shepherd, sitting, 2.6 m, in camouflage paint. Two reasons for the camo, and they were both good. It belongs to the world of working dogs rather than the world of garden ornament. And it lets a plainly emotive object be something you notice first as a pattern and understand second as a memorial.

The posture

We tried standing. Standing read as a statue of an idea. Sitting, with the head level and the ears fully upright, read as a dog waiting for its next instruction, which is what a working dog actually is. The chest depth and the straightness of the front legs were set from photographs of three different animals; there are no identifiable features from any one of them.

The head is oversized by about a third relative to a real shepherd, and the muzzle is shortened. That is what allows it to stay a cartoon at 2.6 m instead of tipping into a portrait.

The camouflage

We kept the pattern clean and stylised rather than photoreal military. Four colours — olive, sand, deep green, charcoal — in large soft shapes, plus a few hard stencil-like marks that do not spell anything. The satin topcoat keeps it legible in the flat Canterbury light, where a gloss finish would have turned the pattern into glare.

At the centre

It stands at the edge of the exercise yard rather than at the gate, so it is part of the day rather than an entrance feature. The handlers rub its head on the way past. That wear is already showing and nobody there wants it cleaned off.