Ethics, Animals and Art

REF2029 Portfolio.

The animal and being animal is a proposition and position that invites observational and critical debate. Yet, the presence of the non-human animal is usually and normatively confined to representational artworks rather than the animal itself in the gallery or museum, which is, potentially, problematically anthropocentric. Using diverse methods, processes, and materials, and curious to a myriad of opening potentialities, and in contrast to this problem, this research with Lee Deigaard explores working as humans from an animal-centric perspective. The research brings sensitivities to the handling of the animal within both the creative act and environment (the gallery) and questions the mechanisms and agencies necessary for both human and non-humans to be positioned as artistic collaborators. This includes questioning and negotiating institutional politics that problematise the inclusion of the live animal within the gallery; how openness and engagement with an untethered animal can create insight and revelation and behaviour; what the necessary human mechanisms and behaviours are to allow free access to collaboration for the non-human.
The portfolio includes a collaborative exhibition, article, guest edited journal on the subject, and presentations that explore and foreground animal proximity and behaviour, inter-species proprioception, reciprocal caretaking, synchronised respiration, and companionate movement. The items examine and reflect on the allowing and embracing of other species within artworks, and of being mindful and sensible with balancing sympathies as humans within an often-unbalanced system of agency. Specifically, the article and presentations glean patterns and insights from the exhibition at Tippetts and Eccles Galleries at Utah State University in 2021, where a dog was invited into their thinking through praxis. The exhibition includes works in performance video, and large-scale durational artworks in drawing and printmaking curated together for the first time. The article and presentations discuss the appropriate and ethical frameworks involved.