'Art with an edge' Banksy's animals divide art critics

It began with the silhouette of a goat perched atop a thin wall near Kew Bridge, with rocks tumbling down signifying the animal's perilous position.

- Nadia Khomami

And over the course of the week, more silhouettes began popping up around London - two elephants with their trunks reaching towards each other from blocked-out windows on the side of a house in Chelsea; a trio of monkeys swinging across a bridge on Brick Lane; and a wolf howling towards the sky, painted onto the face of a satellite on Peckham's Rye Lane.

Yesterday, a fifth silhouette of two pelicans eating fish also appeared on the wall of a Walthamstow fish and chip shop.

The cryptic murals are the work of renowned Bristol-based street artist Banksy. While the artist, whose identity remains unknown, has so far appeared to confirm the pieces as genuine on his Instagram, he did not caption any of them fuelling a fierce speculation over their meaning.

Some social media users began calling the collection the "London zoo" series and developed a theory that Banksy could be comparing the recent far-right rioters to zoo animals. Others linked the images to Gaza; climate change and extinction; Michelangelo's Creation of Adam; and the precarious nature of social media.

Paul Gough, the vice-chancellor of Arts University Bournemouth, and author of Banksy: The Bristol Legacy, said it was quite unusual for Banksy to trail a series of artworks in this way. "By releasing images quickly through the social media site he's eliminated the 'whodunnit' part of the process, which normally obsesses global media," Gough said.