SERIES | Broken Hearts
Unlike the other series, these works are not connected by research topic but in their probing of the same question: what does it mean to feel for, and with, another living being?
Through different mediums—writing, film and song—these works all take their lead from the (often tragic) stories and lives of other animals, or even geographical entities such as the ocean. The local extinction of a frog or the otherworldly ability for a sea slug to re-grow its heart, for example, offer starting points for me to experiment with the impossible task of translating their lived experience into narrative and aesthetic form. The reason that I attempt this impossible task is to practice exercising empathy. These works mark my attempt to try and feel and think with another species, and in turn I hope that others will join me in this pursuit. It may be a grandiose view, but I believe that if interspecies empathy can be felt from storytelling, it can have the power to translate into a more ecocentric understanding of the material world.
When making artworks about other animals, you cannot escape the ethical questions of representation. Rather than try to escape a human perspective, which I can never do, I lean into it further. I believe that anthropomorphisation can be a tool to create empathy in humans for other animals, if approached in a critical way. By this, I mean using it as a way to acknowledge and interrogate the similarities between humans and other animals rather than mask over the animal with the human.
