Statement

My work examines the lives of other animals—who they are and the complex and significant ways we are bound and entangled together.

In his seminal philosophical work What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, Thomas Nagel posits that an organism is conscious if there “is something that it is like to be that organism.” In other words, consciousness involves a subjective point of view—a felt experience of the world. This idea resonates with the biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of an umwelt, that each organism inhabits a unique perceptual world based on their sensory capacities and biological needs. Informed by these positions, along with others, and my own embodied encounters with other animals, I see the human species as one among many sentient animal species. These other animals share the world with us and possess their own, deeply rich, felt sense of their world and worldly relations. And, I think we can approximate an understanding of their lives through careful observation, ethical attention, informed imagination, and empathy. It is from this starting point that I begin looking and thinking about other animals.

Research - theoretical, scientific, aesthetic - takes place alongside my embodied observations to inform my creative practice. Together, these ways of coming to know another animal and their species are a catalyst for a work and, eventually, a conceptual frame. I begin experimenting with the best medium or materials to express or transmit the idea and felt sense of a combined knowledge (aesthetic, scientific, theoretical, embodied, etc.), and work can range from drawing and painting to soft sculpture and land-based (relational) works. Though materially and aesthetically distinct, each work functions as a kind of portrait—an intimate representation of an individual animal within its species. Central to the work is an understanding of how our human ways of being impact the material, worldly lives of other animals, how we are implicated in their loss, and how their lives and our own are critically connected. I see biodiversity loss, both at the species and individual levels, is aesthetic, ethical, cultural, material, and political. As I move through the process of creating, I wonder: what kinds of aesthetics and what kinds of allyship will help support our entwined earthly survival?

At a time of accelerating biodiversity loss and ecological transformation, I seek to honour and respond to the lives of other animals. It is their lives and our relationship with them that I want people to see and to remember.

ME: Why am I alive?

OLD WOMAN: Because everything else is.

ME: No. I mean the purpose.

OLD WOMAN: That is the purpose. To learn about your relatives.

ME: My family?

OLD WOMAN: Yes. The moon, stars, rocks, trees, plants, water, insects, birds, mammals. Your whole family. Learn about that relationship. How you’re moving through time and space together. That’s why your alive.

Richard Wagamese - Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations