Visual Arts, Nottingham Trent University
Thesis title:
Deep canine topography explores canine navigational skills as an invitation to follow the nose, to engage in a more-than-human exploration of place, space, and time through sensory entanglement. As a practice it asks that we abandon upright, bipedal ocular-centric human points of view and embrace vibrant, chaotic space-time-mattering’s through affect, immanence, and playful improvisation. In this thesis I propose, perform, and reflect upon the practice of deep canine topography. In doing so I bring together walking as a contemporary artistic medium, by exploring psychogeography and the score as a critical generator of practice; And critical animal studies in art, as an exploration of human and more-than-human collaborative practice. I will do this by attending to the contact zones between human and canine, by positioning the walkies as a shared, co-authored art practice, which re-connects the human with more-than-human landscapes through a number of actions/events. In doing so I propose that through such collaboration the position of the human is troubled and destabilised, leading to the emergence of new radical cartographies, and human-more-than-human alliances. Deep canine topography explores affective connections, precognitive, and pre-linguistic flows and forces between bodies and objects. Here subjectivity is troubled, becomes fluid, as human-canine and landscape merge through what I refer to as hybridity. The artistic methods employed in deep canine topography seek to experiment with human-canine-landscape hybridity through to explore relational ontologies and sensory synaesthesia. Such radical cartographies enable a positive shift in human-canine-landscape encounters which challenges philosophical humanist concepts of the animal and the sublime.
Two Bodies in Motion - Surface Encounters, part of a multimedia presentation as part of the Becoming Feral 2 pubication. November 2021:
From Watling Street to Elsware: Creative Centre for Fluid Territories (CCFT) - NEW FLUID TERRITORIES: NOMADIC ONLINE DIALOGUE 2 - displacement: Buffer Fringe Festival, Nicosia, 2021:
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1304585/1304586
Forth World Congress of Psychogeography:
04-06/09/2020
It's ok they're friendly, Workshop on collective Deep Canine Topography and Q and A.
Life With and Without Animals:
07/11/2020
University of Derby.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=focS5Kl004c&feature=youtu.be
Paper - Further Adventures in Deep Canine Topography, and Q and A
WARP Walking Research Conference:
29-30/09/2022
University of Amsterdam
https://asca.uva.nl/programme/workshops/warp/warp.html
Paper - Deep Canine Topography, Reconnecting with the wild through the practice of walking with companion species – a reflection on research.
Posthuman Bodies & Embodied Posthumanisms:
12-14/10/2022
University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University
https://posthumanbodiesconference.wordpress.com/
Paper - Deep Canine Topography: Reconstructing radical cartographies and sensory entanglement through the use of the canine mounted action camera.
Not Quite King Not Quite Fish:
08-11/11/2023Presentation of A Year With The Meadows (working title) video work and live canine led walk performance.
Fine Art Practice
Walking Art
Human Geography
Critical Animal Studdies
Animal Rights
Posthuman Philosophy
Member of Two Queens Gallery Leicester