Who’s walking who? Re-connecting with our animal self in the unfolding landscape, through the praxis of walking with companion species

This research focuses on walking, with a canine companion, as an extension of aesthetic walking practice, and is informed by post-humanist philosophy and its application within the fine arts, through embodied auto- ethnographic walking methodologies.

Operating at the intersection of fine art practice, human geography, critical animal studies and ecology, my research seeks to reframe the humble act of the ‘walkies’ as a co-authored act of ‘making’ or ‘performing’ together. Deep Canine Topography introduces a practice through which the human-canine has equal agency and where sensory limits complement each other in the generation of the walk, as an artistic event, through an active choreography, based on intuition, instinct, and improvisation.

Building on previous experiments in Deep Canine Topography (O’Brien 2018), this practice-based research, seeks to integrate and develop the practice as a unique artistic process which helps us to rethink our entanglement with the more than human world, and the way in which we attend to the living landscape. By positioning the canine as co-author of the walk, I will explore new ways of moving through space, as a shared act, which attends to the unfolding landscape as a human/canine hybrid unit, building on the traditions of walking practices, that disrupt and unsettle geographies, by developing a human/canine counter-cartography.