From the Hooves Up, Breeze Embedded 2025

wax and plaster casts from live equine hoof 

150.0 x 160.0 x 150.0 cm each (irreg.) 

Artist: Tina Stefanou

Project manager and sculpture fabricator: Ellen Sayers

Casting and mould maker: Ceren Sinanoglu

Equine collaborator: Breeze 

Equine specialist: Sacajawea

Equine assistance: Tanika Mathews

Commissioned by Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne with support from Creative Australia, Arts House and Yamaha 

From the Hooves Up 2025 is a series of wax and plaster hooves cast from Tina Stefanou’s long-term equine collaborator, Breeze—the oldest horse in the Jocklebeary herd. 

The horse is one of the most long-standing subjects in Western visual culture. Its depiction goes back to prehistoric paintings of the horse in the Caves of Lascaux, France, over 17,000 years ago. Since then, horses have been symbolised in art to represent human status, power, virility and strength; and further commodified through gambling, fashion, and cinema. Horseshoes are also used as talismans of protection from evil spirits, and harbingers of luck and good fortune, providing they are facing the right way up. From the Hooves Up is a homage and critique of these ubiquitous portrayals of the horse. Stefanou isn’t creating another symbol that centres the human, or the market, in relation to the animal. This is a hoof cast from a living being, an elder horse with her own history and community. A living totem. 

Stefanou further destabilises the relationship between subject and context through her decision to present the sculptures along the gallery walls, as if they have grown out from the plaster board. The artist highlights the white cube as a complex modality that bares influence on the work it houses despite historically striving for neutrality.