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To celebrate the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), writer and vicar of Coxwold, North Yorkshire, the Laurence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall commissioned Tom Wood to produce new work for an exhibition. "Cock and Bull" is taken from the last line of Sterne’s picaresque masterpiece Tristram Shandy (1759): "A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick—And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard." Here, Wood depicts a local prize bull, Teddy, along with cockerels. Wood references the British tradition of painting champion animals in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when landowners, farmers, and stockmen were intensifying efforts to produce better livestock through selective breeding. As such, it asks questions about bloodlines and national identity, alluding to "John Bull," the bluff, assertive, anti-intellectual personification of England that emerged in the eighteenth century.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2020