Scapeland

Abstract

I am an art historian and artist working in the interdisciplinary field of animal studies. The photographic series Scapeland is an ongoing inquiry into the construction of ethically-engaged pictorial space. Work from the series was first exhibited in Ecce Animalia at the Museum of Contemporary Sculpture in Poland in 2014, and discussed in my plenary paper for the accompanying conference Animals and their People: The Fall of the Anthropocentric Paradigm?. The paired digital images that comprise each piece in the Scapeland series create a constructed pictorial space that is nevertheless grounded in the natural and cultural landscape of East Anglia, from which all the images derive. Significant influences on the series include Niklas Luhmann’s notion of art as ‘improbable evidence’, Peter Osborne’s work on constructedness and on the necessary incompletion of projects in his 2013 book on the philosophy of contemporary art, and Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between smooth and striated space. Most importantly, Ronald Broglio’s assertion in his work on landscape imagery that ‘haptic spatiality’ offers opportunities ‘to reorganize human relations to nature’ has led me specifically to explore the construction of less anthropocentric forms of pictorial space, both in my Scapeland series and in other areas of my practice. In terms of outcomes, Scapeland remains my most widely exhibited and reproduced series, giving me opportunities to work with curators in the UK, Europe and USA who continue to offer new perspectives on the work and to present it to new audiences. The 2020 the exhibition As Kingfishers Catch Fire: Animals and Imagination at Limerick City Gallery of Art (initially postponed and finally cancelled in November 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic) was to have included a selection of pieces from the Scapeland series, half of which had not previously been exhibited. See http://gallery.limerick.ie/AsKingfishersCatchFire.html