I make work about interspecies kinship as specific to small scale farming in the Midwestern United States. In practice, I combine scholarly and field research, collaboration, performance, video, and sound, at the site of a small-scale family farm. The works span a variety of media, from site-specific installations, sculpture, to live performance. Pieces occur and are shown in contexts ranging from stables to galleries.
Centuries of coevolution produced entwined multispecies histories. This positioned certain species to rely on one another for basic needs. Contemporary farm animal relationships carry this history, ripe with complex depth and beauty. But also in death, often in consumption. The setting of a small family farm emerged as a nuanced research site, at times complicated and others, romantic.
My work is informed by theories and practices in contemporary art, human-animal studies, dance, and feminism. Kinship is contextualized in an anthropological sense--as a transmutable term capable of describing a spectrum of nurturing to exploitative bonds in a variety of situational contexts. Formative years spent in a barn, riding horses, and at summer-long riding camps planted seeds for my practice, an important part of a lifelong multispecies education.
About Ruminant, ongoing research project (2015-Present):
Ruminant is one who ingests plant-based food only to regurgitate it and chew it over, and over, again. I begin by chewing on the word itself. Ruminant stems from the Latin rūmināre, which literally means to chew cud; a term that aptly describes the primary daily activity in which my small herd of dairy-cow-collaborators participate. Humans have adopted this word in verb form: to ruminate. To ruminate as humans means chewing our own cud, meditating on or thinking deeply about whatever it is we might be chewing.
Chew, an embodied act. The term "chewing" is a metaphor to think-through-making, a multi sensory experience. The Latin term rumen, meaning throat or gullet, is a site of interest as the throat is the source of language, generated by the vocal chords which sit at the very top of our trachea. Human’s advanced and complex linguistic abilities have often been the source of division between us and other species, those who cannot respond in a human way. Thus, to explore a relationship with a cow, we must create a new language, one which can only exist in the void between words and physicality. The term ruminant flips the anthropomorphizing of animals onto it’s belly; humans adopted such a physical action into one of thinking. The work explores what it means to have kinship with a cow, to feel an affectionate bond with an individual animal and simultaneously rekindle a 10,000 year covenant of domestication.
Centuries of coevolution produced entwined multispecies histories. This positioned certain species to rely on one another for basic needs. Contemporary farm animal relationships carry this history, ripe with complex depth and beauty. But also in death, often in consumption. The setting of a small family farm emerged as a nuanced research site, at times complicated and others, romantic.
My work is informed by theories and practices in contemporary art, human-animal studies, dance, and feminism. Kinship is contextualized in an anthropological sense--as a transmutable term capable of describing a spectrum of nurturing to exploitative bonds in a variety of situational contexts. Formative years spent in a barn, riding horses, and at summer-long riding camps planted seeds for my practice, an important part of a lifelong multispecies education.
About Ruminant, ongoing research project (2015-Present):
Ruminant is one who ingests plant-based food only to regurgitate it and chew it over, and over, again. I begin by chewing on the word itself. Ruminant stems from the Latin rūmināre, which literally means to chew cud; a term that aptly describes the primary daily activity in which my small herd of dairy-cow-collaborators participate. Humans have adopted this word in verb form: to ruminate. To ruminate as humans means chewing our own cud, meditating on or thinking deeply about whatever it is we might be chewing.
Chew, an embodied act. The term "chewing" is a metaphor to think-through-making, a multi sensory experience. The Latin term rumen, meaning throat or gullet, is a site of interest as the throat is the source of language, generated by the vocal chords which sit at the very top of our trachea. Human’s advanced and complex linguistic abilities have often been the source of division between us and other species, those who cannot respond in a human way. Thus, to explore a relationship with a cow, we must create a new language, one which can only exist in the void between words and physicality. The term ruminant flips the anthropomorphizing of animals onto it’s belly; humans adopted such a physical action into one of thinking. The work explores what it means to have kinship with a cow, to feel an affectionate bond with an individual animal and simultaneously rekindle a 10,000 year covenant of domestication.