Thomas Thwaites. Goat Life

About

Thomas Thwaites has been exploring ways of becoming a goat for the past nine months.This is predicated on a desire to take a holiday from being a human being, and all the existential terror associated with knowledge of our own mortality etc. Of course becoming a goat is impossible, so other goals of the project are to contribute to the philosophical discussion about the impossibility of adopting a perspective other than our own, and to cut across the range of relationships people have to non-human animals. Over the course of the project (amongst other things), he has visited shamans, undergone trans-cranial magnetic stimulation to interrupt the speech pathways of my brain,dissected a goat at the Royal Veterinary College,and finally 'lived' as a goat at a goat farm in the SwissAlps. The project was supported by a small arts award from theWellcomeTrust.

The exhibition will show a video work, an artist’s book, some sculptural objects made as prototype goat adaptation prosthetics, and large format photographic prints.

Thwaites is a designer in the broadest sense, working in the grey areas between the arts. His work has been acquired by the V&A for its permanent collection, and is exhibited internationally and pretty extensively (China, Japan, USA, across Europe). Currently his work is in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Seoul, Korea, and the Vögele Kultur Zentrum, Switzerland. I’ve also had one book (’The Toaster Project’) published by Princeton Architectural Press (it was also translated in to Japanese and Korean) and another book, detailing this Goat Project is currently ‘in press’ with the same publisher, due for release spring 2016.