Encounters: Bumping into Species

My exhibition presents a new body of work - film, sound, prints and sculpture - exploring notions of ‘becoming-animal’ and animality, and considers what new multispecies relationships might be possible.

I situate myself in the surrounding landscape, utilizing these and other similar paradoxical spaces as a residency – a place for encounter and alliance with local nonhuman animals and ecologies. I find a position of sameness with animals. I ease myself into close proximity, not from a separate human position but from a position of animality. It’s a transformative process of undoing and shape shifting, a kind of shedding of humanness.

‘Becoming-animal’, a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, offers an alternative to binary thinking - a mode of escape from fixed identities. It’s rhizomatic and nebulous in nature – a movement, always in flight – it offers a creative opportunity for traversing certain self-centred conceptions.

Our everyday lives and domestic spaces support an ontology of difference, where life and matter are temporal and durational entanglements between humans and nonhumans, in a constant flow of becoming - a transformative process of unravelling and making. Duration is the domain of becoming - where difference lives and plays itself out. My work tests this out through a multiplicity of speeds, intensities, trajectories and sensations. The viewer is invited to become caught up in the work and into becoming undone.