Some Queer Animals
Artist’s book, published 27 October 2023 (Negative Press London); wider project in development
Some Queer Animals is a book and wider project showing postmortem fossil-like life size contact-printed cyanotype portraits of British wildlife. The work responds at a local level to the global loss of 70% of wildlife in the last 50 years and also functions as an experiment in queering wildlife photography, stepping away from working with high tech camera equipment and glossy representations of animals, instead physically interacting with individual animals in the field. Using care as activism, the process of documentation proposes a closer, mutually caring relationship with nature and wildlife; to look after all life on our planet, to nurture, not destroy.
During lockdown walks in and around the village of Linton in Cambridgeshire, I cruised nature, putting my physical self within it, reducing the distance between animal being and human being as I documented British wildlife killed on roads, as well as animals found dead in the surrounding landscape.
Working without a camera, I used a contact printing process in which I gently placed an individual animal being onto paper prepared with photographic cyanotype emulsion and then exposed it in the field using the sun’s UV rays, or in the studio by electric UV light. After exposure, the individual animal’s body was returned to nature, placed under a shrub at the edge of a field.
The prints are postmortem life-size portraits, queer blue and ghost-white impressions of wildlife violently killed, memorials to non-human persons who once lived in my locality, each one a unique being with their own life story.
In the wider project the prints are arranged in groups, presented as large landscape photographs to emphasise how all wildlife is connected and belongs to the same, increasingly decimated, ecosystem.
The process of recording proposes a closer, mutually caring relationship with wildlife and nature, nurturing ecosystems instead of destroying them, to look after all life on our doorstep and planet.
The full title of the book is Some Queer Animals: postmortem cyanotype impressions of British wildlife killed on roads and in the landscape of one English village, May 2020-September 2021.
The project’s title is inspired by the 1940s children’s book, Some Queer Animals And Why (Charles Mortimer, Guildford Press Ltd, 1947), which highlights in poetry and drawings unusual appearance and behaviour in wildlife, teaching children to find value and beauty in nature’s diversity.
Includes essay and poem plus hand-folded double-sided art print insert. Epigraph by Derek Jarman. Available to purchase online at https://www.neg-press.com/product/some-queer-animals
Symbiosis, January 2024, 100 Years Gallery, LondonSome Queer Animals was launched at the Small Publishers Fair, Conway Hall, London, 27 October 2023.
The book was included January 2024 in Symbiosis, a London Alternative Photography Collective show at 100 Years Gallery, 13 Pearson Street, London E2 8JD.
‘Some Queer Animals (Magpie)’ was included in Shutter Hub Open 23/24, December 2023-February 2024, Art at the ARB, University of Cambridge, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT.
Softcover book with art print insert, PUR-bound, 33 colour cyanotype impressions. Book size 240mm x 294mm, 80pp, 170gsm FSC certified wood-free uncoated paper. Double-sided art print, unfolded size 442mm x 546mm, 150gsm FSC certified wood-free uncoated paperstock. Printed in Great Britain. Published 27 October 2023
ISBN 9780957382879
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