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I want to create a space in which a personal animist practice or ritual might take place; a moment where one is encouraged to enter into a deep respect of ‘animality’ or ‘wilderness’. This takes bravery and acceptance of vulnerability, for to deny the subordination of the non-human animal is to challenge rationality and traditional discourses of knowledge. But in return it gives one the opportunity to make sense in a world gone awry, and offers a profound humanising potential to know and communicate with animals, the world and ourselves.
“Conversation”
I will try to learn how to post a sound on here. The tri-note creaking of the trees was more than magic.
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Another video still of something I am working on for honours. It was so hard digging this hole, and Mal - the boy in this image - got such sore ankles…
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Work in progress… ideas forming…
“The council”
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good one I thinkses
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exert from my literature review, talking about Deleuze and Guattaris suggested method of animal connection:
They suggest an action of ‘becoming animal’. Becoming animal, they describe, is a ‘deterritorialization’: a kind of un-humaning of the human, an unthinking or collapse of the conventional human presence. Becoming is something ‘which the animal proposes to the human by indicating ways–out or means of escape that the human would never have thought of by himself’[1] They explain it as a method that ‘replaces subjectivity’[2] and instead nurtures a ceaseless becoming of a multiplicity of interconnected forces, of becoming aligned with the animal. It is not imitation, [3] but a liminal state, where one is neither this nor that, where one is not referencing themselves to any symbolic order. Thus For Deleuze and Guattari ‘ becoming is the affirmation of the positivity of difference’[4]
In this video I am becoming other.
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The first half of my honours year is getting close, and I’m having to stage a greater defence to Sir Panic, he comes too. We have been taking a ‘Research Methods’ class, which other than the obvious, involves sifting through a Mt. Lofty pile of reading and trying to figure out where our research fits into, and fills a gap in the current discourse. BLeugh.
I am investigating what is between human and non-human animals. Its complex, but amazing. Instead of wax, my ears are leaking Derrida, Cixous, Haraway, Deleuze and Guattari and Adorno onto my pillows at night, and of course, Foucault is back to haunt my dreams. I am interested in the disconnection humans have, and through a practical animist type of empathy, inventing ways of reconnection and healing.
conceptual hoohaa aside. Here are some video stills of the work I have done so far.
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“I done wrestled with rain. That’s right. I have wrestled with rain!…” Out snapping shots, wind hail or shine, a mad dog rocks around town with her head cocked catching moments in time. Funny thing, this time she builds a shower. This time foregoing her lens and her power. Catching a moment, a merging of cloud drops – of fighter and artist, a flicker of softness, before breaking on hardness. Maybe they’ll bounce, became small stones of hail – they done handcuffed lightning… they thrown thunder in jail! Hanging like jewels we’re reminded of treasure, a precious commodity, to enjoy and to measure.
– Roushan Walsh.
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Catalogue Essay from ‘mid air’ installation at Seedling Art Space, in April 2012.
Water drops are suspended and hang mid-air, in limbo. Paralysed and held in time, they create thin gravity lines; a potential energy that pulls gently down. Their frozen passage is one that mocks man’s endeavour of ownership perhaps, for although each drop is silently bound, it is slowly evaporating. It has a life span that is neither predictable nor tangible. But light mixes with the stillness and is held within, and against, each drop’s transparency, and as such opens another path that allows for the celebration of the aesthetic. This piece prizes water as a jewel, heralding is as both precious and ephemeral.
Through experimentation Madison Bycroft has chanced upon a water packaging technique, and liked that it referenced both water conservation and sanitization. Much of Bycroft’s work is influenced by her critical perception of the ego-centricity of human existence, and in this work she aligns water with many other ‘products’ in our consumption-driven society; it is simply taken. No thought is given to its ‘life’ beyond the containers that ensure its delivery, or the exclusivity that is inherent with such access. The viewer is further challenged through her use of plastic, for the creation of each drop references our privileged position within the global community where this ‘liquid contract’ is relied upon.
It is well known that in many places open defecation is practiced. In others, waterways have become ‘hidden’ means of disposal for the many by-products of progress. As such, the transparency inherent in Bycroft’s work could be viewed as satirical, but perhaps equally as idealised, for water can indeed be considered a gift of survival for many of the world’s population where countries are in perpetual drought and life is wrestled from a land that is dry and cracked.
Within this piece, water is recognised as finite, transient and yet also beautiful. Importantly, Bycroft is not merely working from within a political paradigm, but creatively reconciling aesthetics with politics. The work as a whole is fragile, vulnerable, gentle, and delicate and it was important for the artist that she not only allowed but encouraged these qualities, which are often silenced in a world that champions strength, autonomy and rationale. The artist’s voice is heard and felt from within the powerful quiet of Mid Air.
-Words Rob Eclaire
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fishhhhh
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my feet
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Samantha and Arti
In Gujurat
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pushkar
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Ali and Jena
