Sett In Their Ways by Angus Gardner

The creature that perhaps piques my curiosity more than any other is a paradoxically powerful, nocturnal omnivore but with a cute clown-like painted on face. 

I once spent hours trying to convince my visiting Maltese uncle Raymond that these animals were real. He studied pictures of them and listened to me tell him about their mysterious nocturnal lives but remained steadfastly unconvinced. He concluded that I was pulling his leg and commented in his own Maltese way that they probably come out at night to ride bicycles- his way of saying I’d made everything up. 

I get it though. Imagine trying to tell someone that there’s a creature here in the UK that lives underground in inherited homes which are often hundreds of years old and very grand. That they only come out in the evenings, look both fierce and comical in equal measure. That they live a very human like routine driven life as if it was set in the 1920s, where the matriarch looks after the cubs, changes the bedding and keeps the home clean whilst the patriarch contributes little to the weekly chores and to cap it off that they have their own toilets. 

No wonder he didn’t believe me. That discussion inspired an early painting of the creature riding a bike and in honour of my uncle who is no longer with us, I called it Raymond. 

I was always going to revisit this creature in my art and a sighting here on the farm earlier this year inspired me to create a glimpse into their world as I see it. 

That creature is of course the badger. 

My badger clan live in their centuries old ancestral sett. Ornate wood panelling is lit by two cherished lamps handed down from generation to generation. An old portrait of great, great grandfather hangs behind the patriarch, dressed in his 1920s attire and seated making minimal contribution to household chores whilst the matriarch gets on with the daily clean, mindful of keeping an eye on the two cubs planning mischief in the corner. 

It’s inevitable that a 1920s theme will draw Peaky Blinders comparisons, with some people already calling the painting ‘Peaky Badgers’ but that’s coincidental - my intention from the outset was to paint a picture that illustrated the imagined 1920s family dynamic centred around a routine driven lifestyle in an ancestral underground home. Which is why the painting is called ‘Sett in their ways’.