I collaborate* with nonhuman beings, mainly livestock and plant life, to sensitize a human audience to a multitude of entanglements with other species. In practice, I address notions of interspecies kinship, multispecies history, land use, and more-than-human collaboration through earthworks, installation, sculpture, sound, moving image, performance, and socially engaged art. The work exists primarily within and between the practice of contemporary art, the field of human-animal studies, and agriculture, paying particular interest to the capacity of art in places of overlap, friction, and reciprocity in human and nonhuman worlds.
My work is informed by decades of lived experience of caring for livestock, as a land steward, and through continued participation in animal husbandry and draft animal powered agricultural practices. In developing long-term relationships with human, nonhuman collaborators, and place, I frame my practice an extension of a lifelong multispecies education.
*Collaborating (co-laboring) is a term I apply to domesticated species with whom we've spent thousands of years co-evolving. Collaborate is a generous term to apply to animal involvement in creative works. It's use here, like the language of visual art, is to communicate with a human audience. The word is a placeholder and starting point for more nuanced conversations.
My work is informed by decades of lived experience of caring for livestock, as a land steward, and through continued participation in animal husbandry and draft animal powered agricultural practices. In developing long-term relationships with human, nonhuman collaborators, and place, I frame my practice an extension of a lifelong multispecies education.
*Collaborating (co-laboring) is a term I apply to domesticated species with whom we've spent thousands of years co-evolving. Collaborate is a generous term to apply to animal involvement in creative works. It's use here, like the language of visual art, is to communicate with a human audience. The word is a placeholder and starting point for more nuanced conversations.