The "Three Hares" silk scarf was illustrated in full by Guest Artist, Arlo Teague. What follows are their thoughts on this project, accompanied by a selection of their sketches.
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The power of rabbits and hares as symbols— in folk art, on currency, in textiles, in the marginalia of sacred texts, in literature, permanently inscribed in our skin— fascinates me. I have tattooed hares and rabbits on people who already have other rabbit tattoos, even if they have never lived with or cared for rabbits. This phenomenon is one I haven’t witnessed with any other animal apart from birds. But birds, unlike rabbits, come in an extreme range of size and perceived ferocity; a song bird is not the same symbol as an eagle is not the same symbol as a crane. Rabbits and hares exist on a much narrower spectrum of feeling and form, and every last one of them is, indisputably, prey.
At a distance, or simplified on a piece of commercial art, even a hare could be described as “cute,” with soft fur and eyes more proportionate to those of a baby animal. Up close, it could not be clearer how beholden to nature and mortality they are. Their large eyes, elongated ears, and enormous fluffy paws look that way to keep them alive in a world where they are everyone’s dinner; the details of their features are gristly and extreme, evidence of constant danger. I’ve heard hares described, often with a tone of surprise, as “creepy”— I think that fits. They remind us of death.
Despite their prey-ness and their ephemeral-lives, they appear on family crests and standards that would have been flown on battlefields, just as lions or eagles do. In some spheres, the symbols of hares and rabbits represent softness and family; in others, they project conventional masculine ideas of strength.
It is because of this duality that they capture my imagination and prove endlessly compelling as subjects.
Watching hares in videos as I sketch them, I observe their rapid pulses, the twitch of their ears to catch any sound, the way they must stop eating or drinking to sit up and scan for danger. I relate. Maybe any of us who tend toward a frayed, hyper-vigilant nervous system can relate. I have accepted that I may or may not ease this reaction in myself in my lifetime, no matter my efforts. But rabbits are built for survival above all else, and if rabbits, who exist in this state of intense awareness from the time their eyes open, aggressively choose to live, then so can I. They are symbols of grit and sensitivity together, and when I draw them, I am drawing on their strength as well.
When I approached this project, I had not known how widespread the symbol of the Three Rabbits was— I thought of them as “Tinners’ Rabbits,” a name used to describe the rendition adorning churches in Devon, England. I knew I loved hares, and that something about the symbol felt both very old and still universally appealing; it felt, in a visual sense, “true.” But that was all I had to go on. Learning of its origins and its journey across cultures and many thousands of miles, unchanged, left me amazed and satisfied; we do, after all, have an enduring and intense relationship with hares and rabbits, and though their meaning across cultures is mercurial, it is something we all share.
The hares you see on this scarf are each species which can be found in specific regions through which the symbol traveled. First is the Woolly Hare, found in Jiuquan, China, where the oldest renditions of the Three Rabbits can be found in the Mogao Caves, a Cape Hare found in modern day Iran, where the Three Rabbits appear on currency and a magnificent brass tray, and, finally, a brown hare, found in the United Kingdom where the Three Hares can be found on various churches. Their ears bind them together, the same way our fates our always bound up in one another’s.
