Counting Sheep

For Sentience, I chose to focus closely on the eye of a sheep rather than depict the animal from a distance. The eye creates a direct encounter with another living being — something intimate that asks the viewer to look back, observe, and recognize consciousness beyond our own.

The sheep’s distinctive horizontal pupil, surrounding facial hair, and wool are reinterpreted through my own biomorphic visual language and luminescent technique. Under ultraviolet light, the work reveals an intense fluorescent spectrum, while phosphorescent elements allow another state of the painting to emerge in darkness.

This campaign is meaningful to me because animals are sentient beings with their own perception and experience of the world. I wanted the artwork to communicate that idea through the act of looking itself — not simply illustrating a sheep, but creating a moment in which the viewer feels that another consciousness is looking back at them.

This piece draws its title and spirit from the 1991 psychological thriller that shares its name, a story built around a young investigator determined to save the voiceless, to hear what everyone else has learned to ignore. That image stayed with me: someone refusing to look away from suffering simply because it's easier not to.

I made this work because I see the same silence happening now, in real time, to real animals. The wool industry treats living, feeling creatures as objects to be sheared, harmed and discarded in service of an aesthetic that could exist without any of that cruelty. Fashion doesn't need to harm the lamb to receive it’s wool. It doesn't need a scream no one's allowed to hear.

The Silence is my refusal to stay quiet about that. It's not justifiable to me that an animal suffers so something can look beautiful on a runway. This piece exists so the silence breaks, so someone, somewhere, has to actually look.

Drawing on Kelly Fogel's evocative photography and Cosmic Collage’s symbolic digital artistry, this collaboration uses art and storytelling to raise awareness of live lamb cutting and promote more compassionate choices. Rooted in a shared passion for animal protection, the collaboration demonstrates the power of creativity as a tool for advocacy and change.

I remember walking down to the sheep enclosure late at night in a sanctuary I was staying at, coming into their enclosure and laying down on the grass next to them, and thinking, these sheep are so lucky, they get to spend every day free, free of pain, free of fear, on the contrary, they are loved and cared for, they are seen as individuals and not numbers, they spend their days grazing, sleeping, eating treats and hanging out with other sheep whom they have strong bonds with. Unfortunately, the reality of millions of sheep inside of factory farms, bred and raised to supply the fashion industry with their wool, is very different. That’s what I want to show with these two murals, what is behind what people wear, the individual and what we do to them, specifically we wanted to bring attention to live lamb cutting, and how this horrific practice contributes to the suffering of millions of individuals that are exploited by the fashion industry. I want people to see these murals and reconsider what they wear and where it comes from and hopefully stop wearing wool, fur, leather, because they all come from kind and sentient beings that deserve to live free.

Sheep have been a big part of my life for many years, both through my work photographing rescued animals and through caring for rescued sheep myself. When you spend time with them, you realise very quickly how individual they are. They have distinct personalities, relationships, preferences and ways of communicating, yet so often they're not seen as individuals.

I wanted to be part of Counting Sheep because photography gives us an opportunity to change that, even if just for a moment. A photograph can invite someone to stop, look into an animal's eyes and consider the individual in front of them. I hope that by encouraging people to see sheep as individuals, we can also encourage them to question the practices that cause them harm, including within the fashion and agriculture industry.

When FOUR PAWS approached Kelly about this project, she learned about live lamb cutting (LLC), also known as mulesing, for the first time. LLC is an outdated procedure practiced only in Australia, the world's largest wool-producing country. Each year, approximately 10 million lambs endure this painful procedure, in which skin and flesh are cut away from around the tail and genital area of lambs, without adequate pain relief. The practice is used to prevent fly larval infestation, but safe and effective pain-free alternatives exist. Driven by global demand for wool, millions of lambs continue to suffer, and hundreds of thousands do not survive the procedure. 

Motivated to help raise awareness, Kelly traveled to a small Merino sheep farm in Montana. She spent time with the farmers and their flock, documenting sheep husbandry practices that avoid live lamb cutting. The farm has chosen jackets for their sheep as one of its parasite control management strategies. Through these images, Kelly hopes to foster greater curiosity about sheep, encourage conversations about wool production, and promote compassion for these intelligent and social animals.

Kelly’s mentor, renowned photojournalist and National Geographic Explorer at Large Ami Vitale adds, “What endures, what matters, are the choices we make. And that brings us to fashion. It is not just about materials, carbon, or circular systems. It is about relationships. It is about whether we see animals and nature as simply resources to use, or as living beings and an interconnected living system. The people making our clothes and animals we use, like sheep's wool—do they have intrinsic value or are they just part of the cost?  It’s not just what we design. It’s how we design. In those choices, we shape the future of fashion and life itself.”

Kelly has also partnered with FOUR PAWS to document rescued lions, tigers, and leopards at LIONSROCK Big Cat Sanctuary in South Africa.

Why Woolie?

A play on "wool " and "woe," that sounds soft and endearing but carries in itself the pain hidden behind it.

"Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth."

Starting from this line of Pablo Picasso I immediately realised that Woolie is not only a sheep. She can represent every soft thing the world has betrayed, holding something like innocence, as if tenderness itself could be sewn from scraps.
And then here comes the wound. Beneath her throat, a tear flesh laid bare beside the words "fashion victim," because cruelty can be hidden in the sweet  face of an innocent animal.

This is why she belongs beside Four Paws because art is not merely decoration, and Four Paws can help the fashionable world look at what it wears, and see, beneath the wool, beneath the trend, beneath the industry, a harmless living thing that bled for it.

Animals appear in my paintings because they reflect a lifelong sense of admiration and kinship with the living world. My husband and I share a deep love of plants and animals, and for many years we volunteered on a farm, helping to care for as many as ninety goats, sheep, chickens, cows, llamas, and other animals.

My paintings are also informed by concerns about our stewardship of the natural world. In John Berger's essay Why Look at Animals?, he writes that animals once occupied "the first circle" around human beings, before observing that even this description places them too far away. His words suggest that humans and animals share the fundamental experience of inhabiting the Earth together. Author Rebecca Solnit is another important influence. She explores the long-standing association between women and nature and argues that patriarchal systems have sought to dominate both. She suggests that a more equal relationship between men and women could foster a more respectful relationship with the environment. Through the presence of animals in my work, I hope to evoke empathy, interconnectedness, and an awareness of our shared responsibility toward the more-than-human world.

My painting for the Counting Sheep project calls back to Spanish painter Francisco de

Zurbaran’s iconic work from the middle of the 17th Century, “Agnus Dei”, and its central theme of the sacrifice of a “pure” or innocent vessel for others’ gain. This is of course a perennial theme that we encounter in the vast archive of archetypal stories that we have told - and beliefs that have been held and acted upon - across all time and expressed in all mediums.

This theme is exhibited in stark and simple language in Zurbaran’s painting, and the symbolism he employed to convey it felt perfectly fitting to revisit and reimagine for my contribution to this collective project. My intention for this work is to prompt the iconic recognition of the famous older artwork - not merely the image itself but what it allegorizes - and to recontextualize it to the present day, and what we seek to bring awareness to in Counting Sheep: the horrific practice of mulesing.

In my re-imagining of Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God”), Agnus Vanitatis (“Lamb of Vanity”)

envisions the symbolic sacrificial lamb in the same pose of involuntary surrender and bondage as Zurbaran first saw it, but the stone slab has been replaced by a table piled with fabrics and lambskin blankets, mulesing shears laid nearby, and in place of the original’s dark vacuum of a backdrop, we find a wallpapered surface with nature-invoking motifs: flowers, plants, leaves, composed in an ordered and symmetrical arrangement. This element, which is echoed by the tablecloth the lamb lies upon, is manmade, yet in its yearning for presenting us with natural forms speaks of our species’ propensity for using nature as extractable resource: we take what we want from her, but manicure and distill her forms to those that we find acceptable and pleasing to view, comfortable to live with, and fashionable to wear.

Animals are subjugated to all kinds of horrors to serve human interests, many of these well-known and many more cloaked in darkness by the industries that rely on them. Mulesing or live lamb cutting, where flesh is sliced from a wool lamb's backside and tail, is one such issue of which many people remain unaware.

The magnitude of animal suffering is immense and not to be minimized. At the core of these issues and easily overlooked is animal joy, their sense of agency and freedom. What kind of life for sheep does the wool industry foreclose? What do our relationships with animals look like when we seriously consider what kinds of lives animals want to live?

What do sheep enjoy most? Bucolic landscapes, fields of clover, good grasses and familiar company. This work comes of meditating on sheep joy and the wish for others to consider sheep as individuals with social groupings, preferences and desires. The dress is made entirely of plant-based textiles, some of which are repurposed from old curtains and junked drop cloths. The sheep are depicted at a distance from the viewer, far away and blissfully unaware of mulesing and rough handling and material purposes beyond their own definition, free to stay back or draw close to humans without fear. This work comes from my wish for a world where sheep thrive and have the freedom to graze and gallop joyously with their flock.

Headcount (2026) is a durational performance examining the relationship between individual animals and the enormous scale of the wool industry. Throughout the performance, I will hand-engrave livestock identification tags one by one. A small plastic tag pierces an animal’s ear, brightly coloured and stamped with a number, marking the animal as part of a system of ownership, production, and control. I was inspired to make this piece in response to the loss of personhood that can occur when animals are absorbed into an industry operating at this scale, and to consider what happens when a living animal becomes a number.

The work responds to practices within the wool industry, specifically mulesing, a painful procedure performed on lambs. Mulesing is particularly associated with the Australian wool industry, which remains the world's largest exporter of wool. Through the repetitive act of engraving each tag, I bear witness to the animals who endure these practices. The act of counting and recording becomes a way of slowing down the enormous scale of the industry and bringing attention back to the individual. Each overlooked tag represents a life moving through a system, and through the performance, I give weight and attention to each one.

No wool, just old clothes becoming soft little lambs. Made to feel somewhere between Grandma’s quilt and your favorite animal at home, these lambs turn discarded clothing into something you want to hold onto. Fashion and art don’t need a living lamb when there is already so much material around us waiting to become something else.

This painting shows a runway model whose gown trails, untethered, into the body of a lamb — the fabric dissolving seamlessly into fleece. On the lamb's hindquarters, the wound marks left by mulesing repeat across the dress as a red rosette pattern, echoing back at the viewer as if it were simply part of the design.

I wanted to make the connection between the garment and its source impossible to look away from — literally stitching the injury into the fashion. Mulesing is the practice of cutting strips of skin from a live lamb's hindquarters, without anesthetic, to prevent flystrike; it's still standard in much of the wool industry. The painting asks what it means that a wound like that can be smoothed into something decorative and sold on a runway.

This piece builds on a series of Fast Fashion paintings I made in 2016 for Lucy Tammam's Moda 360 runway show, which used a similar approach — fashion imagery merged with its material and ethical cost.

My artworks are a celebration of animals, imagination, and wonderfulIy unique personalities. I create whimsical, expressive animals with playful colors, movement, to invite the viewer to stop, and see the world from a slightly different perspective.

 But beneath the whimsy is a deeper purpose: giving a voice to the voiceless. Animals cannot tell us when they are frightened, neglected, or simply in need of our attention. Through my work, I hope to make them impossible to overlook. Each animal becomes a character with its own presence, personality, and story.

The sheep are crowded onto the loading ramp and into the truck. On some days, the Ballarat Sale Yards moved up to 32,000 sheep from vehicles, through chutes, and into other trucks towards unknown destinations: farms, slaughterhouses, or boats where they may spend days or weeks on the ocean, travelling to lands where they will be slaughtered according to Halal practices.

I would never say that I speak for animals. They communicate with each other in ways we, for the most part, cannot understand. And they certainly speak directly to us with their calls and gestures. We can often understand their meaning but pretend we don't.

As I watched the sheep on the ramp, I could understand the meaning of their gestures. They tried to avoid the crowding. They tried to turn around. Some got up on their hind legs and looked on either side to assess whether they could jump. Some managed to turn and face the opposite direction, even though they were halfway up. I took photos and videos of their communication and their resistance.

This photograph is part of an enormous project called We Animals, which chronicles our uses and abuses of animals, and the spaces we share with them. We Animals is now a non-profit organization whose mission is to document the animals we eat, wear, and use for research and entertainment. We are now over 170 photographers who work globally to expose, educate, and empower.

Live lamb cutting, also known as mulesing, is practiced in Australia, the world's largest wool-producing country. Every year, over ten million lambs undergo this procedure.

Lambs, sometimes only a couple of weeks old, have skin and flesh cut away from around their tails and genitals. The procedure is intended to reduce the risk of fly infestations called flystrike, but it is outdated and causes significant pain, distress, and even death. The practice is only carried out in Australia, and their wool is exported all over the globe for use in fashion.

No. Effective alternatives are already available and are being used by thousands of farmers. This means fashion brands can choose wool from supply chains that avoid live lamb cutting.

It continues because demand for wool remains high, and many brands still lack public commitments to sourcing wool that is certified free from live lamb cutting. More than half of the wool used by global fashion brands is linked to live lamb cutting. So, chances are, it's closer to your wardrobe than you think. This is not just Australia's problem. It's a global fashion problem, but you can help to end it!

Fashion brands have the power to help end this practice. By committing to certified live lamb cut-free wool and improving transparency, brands around the world can help drive change throughout the wool industry and end the cruel practice in Australia.