Tag: animals
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Hic fuerunt dracones
Scary Monsters I: mapping the landscape of monstrosity When early map-makers depicted the world, they filled in the familiar regions with exquisite detail – names, places and things thought to exist there, rich layers of imagery and knowledge that resonated with those viewing and using the charts. The unknown regions were an informational blank, a…
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The monstrous body
Scary Monsters II: global greed and the gluttonous dodo Monsters are not just things that lurk under the bed. They are powerful images that have always been used to represent the things we might not want to face in ourselves, as individuals or as communities. Different monsters have represented different fears or anxieties in different…
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The chimaera
Scary Monsters III: collapsing space If you had walked into one of the princely Wunderkammern or cabinets of curiosity of seventeenth-century Europe, you would have been assailed by the wealth of objects covering walls, ceilings, shelves and probably floors; naturalia, exotica and artificialia arranged in strange juxtapositions, decorative arrays and obscure taxonomies. The visual impression…
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The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon
Victoria Rance and I met at Newcastle University in 1980. We were studying Fine Art and English Literature respectively and have remained friends ever since. We share an interest in psychology, Jungian ideas and the power of mythology. Victoria Rance’s latest exhibition, The Night Horse and The Holy Baboon, at The Cello Factory Waterloo, was…
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The Unending Cycle
For Ayesha I look into Haruki’s eyes and discover something that disturbs me profoundly. There is a familiarity. In the aftermath of The Demolition Of My Construct (my break-up), I must admit I am suffering from a fear of intimacy with anyone, anything. Even these fluffy felines, Haruki and Mowgli. What I see in his…
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The Second Body
At 6 a.m. on a Thursday morning in November it was completely dark outside, but the butcher’s shop was strip-lit and the raw meat area was full of busy young men. It was difficult to see exactly what they were doing – the men were large and they were moving quickly in a small crowded…
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The CleanMeat Revolution
In The Box Gallery at the heart of We The Curious – Bristol’s centre for science and technology – is David Lisser’s exhibition, ‘The CleanMeat Revolution’. From the vantage point of a fictional future, the exhibition looks back at the period around 2030–2080. The show presents artefacts excavated from an imagined past, documentation of protests…
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Wolf yollez
‘We’re not far from wolves.’ – Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1914: One or Several Wolves?’ Human-canine relationships are some of the most conceptually disordered and uncertain of interspecies relationships, precisely because the history of domestication is so long and so complex. The type of canine perspective offered by contemporary writers such as Donna Haraway…
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Shadow Sisters
A pack of dogs, a suggestion of a transformation, a woman in a wild place. A wolf. In the analogue photography of Joanna Pallaris, the time, as Hamlet had it, is out of joint. Double exposures make visible the formation of a rock face through the head of a dog. A woman’s face – the…
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A Wolf, Crossing
When night falls in the Charente, the inhabitants of its rural villages retreat to their homes. They lock their doors and pull iron-hinged timber shutters over every window. Pale sandstone walls, grey with age, cracked and pitted, their seams of lime mortar dried to dust, become as impenetrable as medieval keeps. In the dark, you…
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Blood Ties
There was a girl who met up with a wolf, back in Distant Time, when wolves were human. The wolf wanted her for his wife, even though he had two wives already. When he took her home, his two wives smelled her and knew she was human. After a while she had a child –…