Mother Earth's Milk September 14 2014

I, Katie Turpenoff, had a lot of fun creating my cow. The cow is life size, made of steel, and filled with 1226 baby bottles. I came up with the idea so that I could enter a competition at my school, Southern Illinois University of Edwardsville, called Sculpture on Campus. The piece revolves around the idea that cows are treated like literal milking machines and we as people have forgotten that a cow is a living creature. The use of baby bottles talks about the importance cows’ milk plays in human lives from when we are very young into adulthood. The baby bottles also talk about the fact that dairy cows are artificially inseminated so that they will constantly produce milk. Most dairy cows only live up to three years because they are one of hundreds that have few caretakers. The baby bottles serve an even greater purpose they make people look at the piece, the cow, and think. That is all I want people to do. I want them to think about the cow, and when people start doing that it means the cow is being noticed again instead of just being a milking machine. By Kati Turpenoff