ANIMAL
This work comprised a set of air-brush painted murals, forming a corridor through St John’s Market, a dilapidated market that is run by the municipality since the 1970s. The imagery was developed from photographs of animals, composed into one continuous frieze and painted by an airbrush company. A preoccupation of this installation was a mode of portrayal that would occupy uncanny and festishised registers, exploring the animal as a distinctively human projection surface. The beings in the work have an instability of category; – we are looking at them, or rather their representation, and to some extent at ourselves. A question that loops back, and in the dialogues around it, is on the one hand a crisis of co-habitation and the breakdown in our relation with other living beings, whilst also an exploration of the more slippery questions of how and on which terms those relations could be re-imagined.
Two spray-painted metal sheets, 2 m x 5 m x 3 m, 2019. Commission for Tate Liverpool. With the help of Freshfields Animal Shelter, St Johns Market, John Moores University, Liverpool.
