Feral Attraction: The Museum of Ghost Ruminants
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Cumbria
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Wilson2
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- Reykyavik and Westfjords, Iceland
- Brief description of type
- Exhibitions and Artists Book
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- February
- Year
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Feral Attraction draws on a series of events in northwest Iceland during 2009/10, exploring non-human self-determinacy, the visible and invisible boundaries of categorisation, and their effects as applied in our
understanding of domestication and wildness.
Our exhibition in response, highlighted several issues of contention regarding conceptions of ‘nature’ and animal presence and rights, and the preoccupation of humans with the maintenance of perceptual and physical boundaries between wildness and the domestic. In this we noted an apparent denial of the capacities of animals that contradict or extend our projections upon them.
The artwork, comprising video, photographic and sculptural work and material traces, has been installed at two venues – in Reykjavík in 2016 and in Patreksfjördur in the Westfjörds, 2018-19. Documentation of all
research material also now exists as a publication, including interview transcriptions, together with a visual record from the respective exhibitions.
For our research, (beginning 2010), we conducted fieldwork, including interviews and a physical exploration of the mountain Tálkni where events took place. We audited, exposed and through a series of related public events around the exhibitions, involving locals, original participants and any others, created ways to discuss a complex set of responses both locally and nationally from within governmental and farming, urban and rural communities.
In October 2009, a flock of feral sheep that had lived beyond human influence for over three decades in a largely inaccessible part of Iceland’s Westfjords was, on government directive and with great difficulty, rounded up by a team of men and dogs from neighbouring communities. Despite (or perhaps because), the incident had caused so much public interest and outrage, the sheep were taken immediately to the abattoir and their carcasses disposed of. The opportunity to investigate apparent adaptive physiological changes, observed in the sheep by locals, was lost as a consequence.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -