Bonita Alice

Beast In A Dangerous Landscape

Beast Leaves 2012 (installation view)
wool dust and archival glue on paper, each panel 39cm diameter

(click on images to view complete image)

John Berger wrote a story about a lake in which the lake has a voice, a history and a memory of that history.

It begins ...

“I am an alpine lake. I measure 750 metres by fifty metres. I am about seventy metres deep. One of my neighbours to the west is an alpage called Annely. I am called Falin. I reflect with my eyes shut. When I do this indiscriminately, you, you see dark green, nothing else.”

When asked about the “borderline” between the self and other in the writing process. Berger suggests it is a process of osmosis.

“That which has become part of one’s own experience and life is already other people ... the self is already collective”.

In the end he, says, he realised the story of the lake is the story of Narcissus “seen from the other point of view. ... For a while I thought I was writing about a lake which was out there, I was writing actually about something that was already inside me, although I was not writing about myself.”

John Berger, The Act of Approaching, an interview with Nikos Papastergiadis

Beast Well-Clothed 2011

wool dust and archival glue on paper, 55 X 44cm

The crisis-of-the-earth of our age is nothing if not a reflection of humanity’s chaos and muddled thinking. Our actions say “we cannot tolerate change” while ensuring that change will be total and uncontrollable. In our relationships with the non-human animals who inhabit the landscape with us, we’ve never advanced very far in terms of reconciliation but refined and perfected their oppression as if seeking proof of what we regard as our superior position.

Beast is the spectre of this most ambivalent of relationships. Beast is my image of internal noise played out as external disturbance. It plays out the dramas that follow when private crises that lie unattended inside leak out and are exposed in shared turmoil. The landscape around Beast both suffers and causes the effects of it’s crisis.

Projecting the inside onto the external landscape is something individuals do. I suspect though there's a parallel that occurs on a grand scale with peoples and nations. It is a theme common, for instance, in Japanese Art and belief, that destructive events in nature are linked to the unresolved emotional dynamics of individuals and peoples. Hokusai’s Wave, we know, is not just water.

Bonita Alice 2012

Beast Well-Clothed 2011

wool dust and archival glue on paper, 55 X 44cm

“..contemporary criteria for what counts as moral, sane, and rational make the assertion of intrinsic human inequality and defense of social discrimination universally impossible, let alone illegal. The same is not true for those interested in countering speciesism, whose norms are still a work in progress. ... Care and concern invariably turn into finite quantities, with never enough to go around beyond narrow human interest.”

Kalpana Rahita Seshadri in HumAnimal - Race, Law, Language 2012