Some Queer Animals
• Artist’s book, published 27 October 2023 (Negative Press London)
• Shortlist The Author Book Award 2024, Arles Les Rencontres de la Photographie
• Shortlist EI2024 Photobook Award, Braga, Portugal
• Wider project in development
Some Queer Animals – exhibition view, Prix du Livre D’Auteur 2024, La Mécanique Génerale, Arles, France, until 29 September 2024
Some Queer Animals (Some British Birds) – Installation view, Symbiosis II, Four Corners Gallery, London, May 2024
Some Queer Animals (Some British Birds) and Some Queer Animals (Fox) – Installation view, Cambridge Artspace, April 2024
Installation view, Symbiosis, 100 Years Gallery, London, January 2024
Installation view, Symbiosis II, Four Corners Gallery, London, May 2024. Photograph by Anna Lukala
Some Queer Animals is a book and wider project showing postmortem fossil-like life size contact-printed cyanotype portraits of British wildlife. The work responds at a local level to the global loss of 70% of wildlife in the last 50 years and functions as an experiment in queering wildlife photography, stepping away from working with high tech camera equipment and glossy representations of animals, instead physically interacting with individual animals in the field. Using care as activism, the process of documentation proposes a closer, mutually caring relationship with nature and wildlife; to look after all life on our planet, to nurture, not destroy.
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, documenting British wildlife killed on roads as a consequence of wildlife-vehicle colissions, 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 blue and ghost-white impressions of wildlife violently killed, memorials to non-human persons who once lived in my locality, each one a unique being with their own life story.
In the wider project the prints are collated as groups to emphasise how all wildlife is connected and belongs to the same, increasingly decimated, ecosystem. These collated works are hand-folded archival pigment prints on Japanese washi paper from cyanotype originals.
The full title of the book is Some Queer Animals: postmortem cyanotype impressions of British wildlife killed on roads and in the landscape of one English village, May 2020-September 2021.
The project’s title is inspired by the 1940s children’s book, Some Queer Animals And Why (Charles Mortimer, Guildford Press Ltd, 1947), which highlights in poetry and drawings unusual appearance and behaviour in wildlife, teaching children to find value and beauty in nature’s diversity.
Includes essay and poem plus hand-folded double-sided art print insert. Epigraph by Derek Jarman. Available to purchase online at https://www.neg-press.com/product/some-queer-animals
Some Queer Animals in Esposiçao Photobook Award Exhibition, Encontros Da Imagem 2024, Braga, Portugal, 20 September-3 November 2024
Some Queer Animals in Arles 2024 Book Awards Exhibition, La Mécanique Génerale, Arles, France, 1 July-29 September 2024
Some Queer Animals, shortlisted for AUTHOR BOOK AWARD, Arles Les Rencontres de la Photographie 2024
Some Queer Animals in B for Book curated by Sarah Bodman, Frankenstein Press, Bristol, UK, 28 June-19 July
Some Queer Animals (Sparrow) in ‘In Praise of Birds’, WBN United Artists, Bower Ashton Library, UWE Bristol, 19 April-16 July 2024.
Some Queer Animals (Some British Birds) in Symbiosis II, London Alternative Photography Collective, Four Corners Gallery, 121 Roman Road, London E2 0QN, 15-18 May 2024.
Some Queer Animals, Some Queer Animals (Some British Birds), and Some Queer Animals (Fox) in Pathways, a one-day installation of work and exchange with artist Noor Ali Chagani, Cambridge Artspace, Cambridge, 20 April 2024.
Some Queer Animals in Symbiosis, a London Alternative Photography Collective show at 100 Years Gallery, London, January 2024.
Some Queer Animals (Magpie) in Shutter Hub Open 23/24, Art at the ARB, University of Cambridge, Alison Richard Building, Cambridge, December 2023-February 2024.
Some Queer Animals was launched at the Small Publishers Fair, Conway Hall, London, 27 October 2023.
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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