Fieldworks: Animal Habitats in Contemporary Art
Until 2 November 2014
Lewis Glucksman Gallery
University College Cork
Ireland
Artists: Adam Chodzko, Petra Feriancova, Petrit Halilaj, Ho Rui An, Jochen Lempert, Flo Maak, Chris Marker, Wesley Meuris, Ciarán Murphy, Vanessa Safavi, Julia Schmid, Sonia Shiel, Ruth van Beek
Curated by Chris Clarke, in partnership with BEES (Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences), University College Cork
Fieldworks is an exhibition of Irish and international contemporary artists whose work explores the environments inhabited by different animals. From remote woodlands to urban locales to artificial or scientific displays, this exhibition takes a closer look at these places, offering insights into how animals forage, nest and play and how their habitats are represented in contemporary art.
Throughout Fieldworks, a number of artists address the hidden presence of animals, their proximity to human civilisation and the ways in which we interact. Ciarán Murphy‘s paintings reveal darkened caves, treetop nests and snow-capped mountains, with his subjects portrayed in compositions that suggest infrared vision or overhead, aerial perspectives. This approach also informs Adam Chodzko‘s Night Shift series, where the nocturnal habits of rats and toads, snakes and stags are vividly captured through night-vision photography. Petra Feriancova employs a different photographic tactic in her work, reproducing the small colour snapshots of distant birds taken by her aunt in 1970s east Africa.
In recent times, the incursion of wild animals into urban locations represents a shift in their patterns of living, and this juxtaposition is approached through works that look at the tentative adaptation of animals to modern life. Flo Maak digitally manipulates his photographs to introduce images of zebras and polar bears into man-made artificial shelters, while Sonia Shiel‘s sculptural installation of everyday objects and materials combines elements of the natural environment and contemporary consumer society. In Ho Rui An‘s film Incursion, an attempt to make a wildlife documentary is continually interrupted by modern distractions. Jochen Lempert‘s photographs reveal the artist’s original training as an animal biologist, as he documents migrating birds in city streets and parks.
Chris Marker‘s short films capture the households, zoos and parks that increasingly serve as the homes of animals, while Vanessa Safavi‘s sculptural installation of taxidermy birds suggests a sense of the animal as a domestic object. The hamsters, rabbits, and guinea pigs portrayed in Ruth van Beek‘s photographic collages have been folded together, creating strange new hybrids that are simultaneously endearing and disturbing.
The ways in which we observe animals are represented in artworks that acknowledge the roles of scientists in our understanding of different species. Petrit Halilaj uses materials borrowed from the Natural History Museum of Kosovo to create sculptural installations and drawings, while Julia Schmid‘s intricate pencil drawings portray the displays of animal habitats from a range of museums. For Wesley Meuris, the zoological enclosure represents an idealised image of the natural environment, and, in his large sculptural work and series of drawings, the architectural qualities of these spaces are emphasised while their animal occupants remain nowhere to be seen.
Developed in collaboration with researchers from University College Cork’s school of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences (BEES), Fieldworks includes a programme of public talks including artists Ruth van Beek (2 October), Ciarán Murphy (9 October) and Julia Schmid (16 October) and Professor Stephen Foster, Director of John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton (22 October).
An accompanying exhibition catalogue will be published in autumn. For further information and advance orders, please email exhibitions [at] glucksman.org.
Fieldworks is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Flemish Agency for Art & Heritage, the Goethe Institut, the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and private philanthropy through Cork University Foundation.
