Natalia Sebastian
What is on Your Mind?
At the early stages of this project, my chosen theme concentrated on the idea of people liking to stroke the fur of animals because of our furry past. This idea comes from John Bradshaw’s The Animals Among Us.
To start with iI have researched the following: Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi, John Bradshaw’s The ~Animals Among us and Erica Fudge’s Pets, all of which have deepened my theory of the subject. For the visual influences, I have researched the collage work created by Hannah Hoch in which she merges humans and animals in order to show the difference between them and the environments they obfuscated which is something that I kind of wanted to touch on with my work.
Then I had a look at Walter Potter and the work in which he humanises the animals by putting them into everyday life scene which would usually be done by humans such as a set in a classroom or a funnel using taxidermized animals which I am not a fan of however I like the way he puts them in the everyday scenes. Lastly, I had a look at Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare performance in which he walked around a gallery for 3 hours with the carcass of a hare whispering inaudibly to it.
I really liked the fact that he challenged the sculptural convention with unorthodox materials such as bee’s wax, felt, fat and the dead animal.
With the influence of John Bradshaw’s assumption that humans like to stroke, the fur comes from our furry past and the collages created by Hannah Hoch I created a series of collage pieces that present screenshots from the film created in the previous project on which I am stroking or kissing my rabbit, on top of those I have collaged in a giant rabbit paw.
The A5 sized screenshots from my film from my Unspoken Companionship project aim to show the connection between human and non-human and the introduction of collage into it brings out the differences between us. The rabbit paw aims to underline that if we like to stroke fur because of our past, we might also still like to be stroked by someone else, and what could be better than a giant rabbit paw stroking you back?
From this idea, I have created a giant rabbit paw which purpose was supposed to be a part of my further work in this project and being on the display for people to be able to take photographs with it so that it becomes more open to other human and non-human relationship rather than just mine. The photographs taken could have also become a resource to work with in future project.
Due to COVID19, this project had to be changed into something that was possible for me to create at home.
Because of the change of circumstances, I have had to change my theme to How do animals think?, I wanted to find out what goes on in animal’s mind, what kinds of thoughts it has and are they able to think like humans? Of course, different animals require different needs in order to be happy, many can feel the same cold, pain and pleasure, fear, stress and anxiety according to Duncan. I. (2006) The changing concept of the animal sentence. Sometimes animals can enjoy the same kinds of experiences as we do for example a dog enjoys a lie in the sunshine or munch on delicious food. We may never be able to understand how an animal thinks, just like we may never be able to understand just how our family and friends think.
Following the research I wanted to try and guess what a dog might think in certain situations, would it give us a straight answer as our friend would or would it think about ‘dog solutions’ for them? Therefore I decided to make a film about the relationship between a human and a non-human in this case a man and his dog. The film is a multi-channel projection with the main screen containing the key story in which Shaun comes back home after having a really bad day and as soon as he comes through the door, he begins to tell Neo (his dog) all about it. Obviously, the pet can’t physically answer him or make him feel any better with words, for that reason the piece contains bobble thoughts in which Neo is answering back with his dog solutions for the situations he is being told about. The main aim of this part of the multi-channel projection is to show how strong their relationship is to the point where Shaun tells his pet about the bad day, he had just like he would share it with a human friend.
Both of the sides of the projection aim to show the absence for both of them when they not around each other which creates sadness and boredom for both of them. On the left, they show Noe wandering around the house looking miserable and having nothing to do because Shaun isn’t there to throw the ball around with him or just for the company. Similarly, on the right we see Shaun also looking sad and bored while he does his usual stuff during the day, scrolling through photographs or doing his work.
The use of a multi-channel screen becomes really important as it allows me to show three different sides of the story, one where they both together and their relationship shows and two sides in which they both missing each other. While watching it the viewer concentrates on the main screen which contains the main story, at the same time the brain automatically picks up the information from the side screens, this way the audience gets all the stories from one video instead of three separate ones.