Some Queer Animals 

Postmortem cyanotype impressions of British wildlife killed on roads and in the landscape of one English village, May 2020-September 2021  

Published Negative Press London, 2023



Some Queer Animals is a book and art project responding at a local level to the global loss of seventy per cent of wildlife in the last fifty years.

The book shows postmortem fossil-like life-size cyanotype portraits of British wildlife recorded during lockdown walks in and around the village of Linton in Cambridgeshire. I cruised nature, putting my physical self within it, reducing the distance between animal being and human being, recording British wildlife killed on roads, as well as animals found dead in the surrounding landscape.

Working without a camera, I used a contact printing process in which I gently placed an individual animal being onto paper prepared with photographic cyanotype emulsion and then exposed it in the field using the sun’s UV rays, or in the studio by electric UV light. After exposure, the individual animal’s body was returned to nature, placed under a shrub at the edge of a field.

The prints are postmortem life-size portraits, queer impressions of wildlife violently killed, memorials to non-human persons who once lived in my locality, each with their own life story and family. In the wider project the prints are arranged in groups, presented as large landscape photographs to emphasise how all wildlife is connected and belongs to the same, increasingly decimated, ecosystem.

The project proposes a closer, mutually caring relationship with nature and wildlife, nurturing ecosystems instead of destroying them, to look after all life on our doorstep and planet.

Includes essay and poem plus folded double-sided art print insert. Available to purchase online at https://www.neg-press.com/product/some-queer-animals

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Cyanotype impressions from Some Queer Animals are included in Shutter Hub Open 23/24, 27 November 2023-2 February 2024, Art at the ARB, University of Cambridge, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road,  Cambridge CB3 9DT.

Softcover book with art print insert, PUR-bound, 33 colour cyanotype impressions. Book size 240mm x 294mm, 80pp, 170gsm FSC certified wood-free uncoated paper. Double-sided art print, unfolded size 442mm x 546mm, 150gsm FSC certified wood-free uncoated paperstock. Printed in Great Britain. Published 27 October 2023

ISBN 9780957382879

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