We search the skies for wonder while stepping over it in the grass.

My alien animals began the way most honest creative work begins, quietly, without a grand plan. Just curiosity poking at the edges of an idea. Around that time the world seemed briefly obsessed with things in the sky. UAP they called them now, which still feels like a rebrand of the old UFO conversations many of us grew up with. Grainy footage, official statements, endless speculation. The internet doing what it does best, turning uncertainty into fear and entertainment at industrial scale.

I am not against the idea that something else might exist out there. The idea of visitors from somewhere beyond our small blue paddock is kind of wonderful. But most of what circulates feels less like discovery and more like modern mythology assembled from algorithms, filters and a deep human hunger to be amazed by something distant rather than something close.

Meanwhile we are already living on a planet populated by amazing creatures that would break people’s brains if they were introduced as aliens instead of animals. Change the label and suddenly people pay attention. Present the same being as wildlife and somehow it becomes a midday nature documentary.

The zorilla was where that realisation landed for me. If an illustrator designed this animal from scratch people would accuse you of pushing the design too far. Black and white warning stripes like a walking hazard sign. Fearless attitude wildly disproportionate to its size. A defence system so potent attackers learn very quickly to reconsider their life choices. It can handstand while deploying its chemical defence with unsettling precision, which feels less like biology and more like a piece of absurd performance art designed by evolution after a long night out.

Call it Alien Species ZR 01 and suddenly it becomes fascinating. Call it a zorilla and most people scroll on.

Human attention has become slightly twisted that way. We search the skies for wonder while stepping over it in the grass. The extraordinary has been normalised simply because it already exists. Nature does not need spectacle. It only asks that we notice.

At the same time the louder distractions multiply. Public conversations drift toward whatever flashes brightest while deeper shifts move quietly underneath. Watching politics lately sometimes feels like watching chickens scratching at dry soil, completely absorbed in the few grains directly in front of them while something enormous gathers just beyond the fence line. The artificial intelligence wave building right now feels less like a tool arriving and more like a weather system rolling toward the farm gate whether anyone feels ready or not.

Which brings me back to artists, because this is quietly where the opportunity sits. Artists have always been the ones who notice what gets swept under the rug. The overlooked species. The uncomfortable truths. The strange beauty hiding in plain sight. Sometimes that communication is overt, sometimes it slips into culture sideways through story, humour, symbolism or pattern. Art moves ideas into the social bloodstream long before people realise their thinking has shifted.

It makes you wonder whether the starving artist myth was ever accidental. A society benefits greatly from creativity, but independent voices with time, stability and clarity are harder to manage. Keep artists exhausted, financially unstable and chasing survival and there is very little energy left to question narratives or redirect attention.

An artist with a job, however, is a slightly dangerous thing. Income removes desperation. Stability removes the need for approval. Suddenly there is space for focus, experimentation and honesty. No quiet self censorship creeping in because rent depends on pleasing the right gatekeeper. Just the language of art doing what it has always done, communicating ideas human to human in ways statistics and headlines never can.

That balance feels important now. Making work grounded in the real world while technology reshapes the landscape around us. Using creativity not to escape reality but to illuminate it. To point gently, or sometimes bluntly, toward what matters before it disappears beneath noise and distraction.

The alien animals ended up becoming less about creatures from elsewhere and more about rediscovering the wonder already sharing this planet with us. A reminder that artists still have a role as translators between attention and awareness. One eye on the soil, one eye on the horizon, quietly helping people notice what was always there waiting to be seen.