David Gilhooly
Secret Life of Frogs

"This was my first frog pot. I had done the African animal things, you know, full sized crocodiles, an aardvark or two and even a warthog which was all fine, but those little frogs I had done as cup handles were sort of stuck in my mind. I had already thought of them as the same size as rhinos and elephants so they must be different from the amphibians we know as frogs."

"But what was that difference? Some people kept telling me that they must be going to take over after we had wiped ourselves out with some nuclear holocaust. Others just thought them cute and whimsical. But I, having no special feelings for them either way, thought that they were, in the end, just us, using a different body. The body we use is unimportant, any body might do, frog bodies seemed as adaptable as some lemur. Bodies are after all just a tool for us to use. So why couldn't there be "frogs" just like us in some parallel universe where the choice was made 65 odd million years ago to use a frog body rather than that of some protopig or lemur?"

"And if we were using a different body, how would history be different? We are in many ways adapted, even controlled by our bodies so there might be parallels to our history, but there could just as well be great divergences. I first explored these possibilities in a tour that a group of FrogScouts took of their world. Every young frog had to take this tour and this was a tour more personal to me. This was their first stop."

dgilh

Gilhooly Exhibition Review
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