Encounters: Bumping into Species

About

My art practice explores notions of ‘becoming-animal’ and animality. I work with film, sound and video performance. I draw and make sculpture and, more recently, cyanotype prints. I interweave the real and the imagined, or the rational and the intuitive to consider what new multispecies relationships might be possible.  

I situate myself in the surrounding landscape, utilizing these and other similar paradoxical spaces as a residency –  a place for encounter and alliance with local nonhuman animals and ecologies. I find a position of sameness with animals. I ease myself into close proximity, not from a separate human position but from a position of animality. It’s a transformative process of undoing and shape shifting, a kind of shedding of humanness.

‘Becoming-animal’, a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, offers a mode of escape from dualistic thinking and fixed identities. ‘Becoming-animal’ is above and below the threshold of perception, replacing subjectivity. It’s rhizomatic and nebulous in nature – a movement, always in flight – it offers a creative opportunity for traversing certain self-centred conceptions.

Our everyday lives and domestic spaces support an ontology of difference, where life and matter are temporal and durational entanglements between humans and nonhumans, in a constant flow of becoming - a transformative process of undoing and redoing. For philosopher, Elizabeth Grosz duration is the field in which difference lives and plays itself out – the domain of becoming. My work tests this concept through a multiplicity of speeds, intensities, trajectories and sensations. The viewer is invited to become caught up in the work and into becoming undone.

I use ambiguity, absurdity and humour to test and blur the human-nonhuman boundaries and to question ways in which we relate to other species. My intent is both playful and serious – the aim is for the viewer to lose self-awareness by tempting them into these imaginary spaces; to open up new worlds and new possibilities.

Website: https://www.karenpiddington.co.uk/

Instagram:  @karenpiddington