Grid, Net, Snare, Screen: Translating Multispecies Worlds through Artist Moving Image

Immersed within a constellation of human/animal perspectives, this research will harness my experiences growing up in rural communities, combined with years working as a practicing artist. It will create new audio-visual representations of multispecies worlds, tackling pressing issues about our relationship with other lifeforms in an increasingly uncertain world.

My interdisciplinary art practice incorporates theoretical, imaginative and empirical research, using tools of drawing, filmmaking, installation and performance. It examines and reconfigures human-animal interactions, mobilizing diverse knowledge systems-from hunting practices, to animal-assisted therapy and research.

Through three main artworks and a thesis, I will focus on ethical dilemmas bound in interspecies translation, asking how these exchanges are mediated in artworks. I will translate multispecies sensorial worlds within geometric confines of the screen, devising unique modes of filming and presentation. The research will be distributed in exhibitions, screenings and symposia intended to produce new perspectives for audiences.

I began to explore human-animal communication in my Master's studies at the Slade School of Art (2012). In the past 8 years working as a professional artist, I have had exhibitions, residencies and commissions internationally, through which my practice has become increasingly based in research, involving engagement with diverse communities and contexts. I received an Arts Council Grant to collaborate with Mongolian Herdsmen, exhibiting in 'Land Art Mongolia Biennial' (2015). In 'Residency 108', USA, I made 'Lure' (2017) involving the documentation of a deer hunt on US Election Day. In 2018, Groundworks commissioned my film 'Eating Up the Sky', for which I collaborated with scientists at Oxford University and a professional falconer. It explores how environments shape bodies, translating Milton Keynes' architecture through interactions between hawk, falconer and drone.

Doctoral research will develop my practice and widen its impact, building interdisciplinary networks, embracing new technologies and facilitating in-depth, longer-term engagements with film-subjects and landscapes. It will expand the notion of the act of filming to an act of preying and visual capture by innovating custom filming methods and species-specific camera tools with a selected field of view and colouration. It will challenge anthropocentric representations, translating multispecies worlds within the geometric confines of the screen.

This project will build on my proposed supervisory team's research in imagined eco-futures, camera as research tool, and more-than-human geographies, by focussing on species discourse, film ethics and ecology. It will produce new aesthetic perspectives on other-species perceptual worlds, furthering knowledge and social-cultural awareness of ourselves as human-animals.