Output details

between you and me

Joint research project between Reader Mark Wilson and long term collaborative partner, Professor Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir, leading to exhibition.

between you and me acknowledges the presence of non-human-animals as co-partners in any human-animal dialogue with landscape. The project centred on the representations and intrinsic value of things and calls into question the myriad bases upon which we construct such representations, with the key works 'the naming of things' and 'Three Attempts' forming the basis of the exhibition.

The project set out to test the effects of representation, investigating the relationships between naming and taming, the functionality and consequences of animal image appropriation and depletion, and to voice ideas concerning the perception of ‘environment’ and ‘wilderness’ in relation to both human and non-human occupancy and usage of natural spaces. The project also considered environmental ontology in the context of historically incremental detachment from ‘wild’ landscape, and to test new interspecific relationality predicated on respect and inquisitiveness.

The seal was selected as the focus of the project as a non-human-animal which is widely appropriated in Western culture, for a variety of human-animal representations. The research explored the logical indeterminacy of the seal within this cultural context, and used this complexity and variance in perception, usage and instrumentalisation to extrapolate more widely to explore human/non-human animal relations.

The output of the research project, the video works the naming of things and Three Attempts were installed alongside video interviews with Icelanders for whom the seal has been a significant animal, either in continuation of a cultural legacy through hunting or ‘farming’ or in relation more recently to their role as a tourist attraction. In the initial exhibition at Kalmar Konstmuseum, Sweden, the exhibition was in juxtaposition with works from the Museum collection – paintings, sculptures and prints – all of which we selected as human representations of animals.