Mad enough to cry for an animal?*

Shrouded mole during burial

Over the last two years I have been developing a project around human practices of mourning in an age of extinction, and specifically around the loss of wild animals in the UK. ‘Mad Enough to Cry for an Animal?’ originally formed the subject of my major research project for my MA, and has since become part of my ongoing practice. It studies specific, individual attitudes to wild animal death and asks whether human practices of mourning and commemoration are arising in response.

During a period of primary research, I received an overwhelming response from project participants, and it became clear that while private mourning practices regularly occur, it is a subject that many feel unable to talk about openly. Moreover, participants widely recognised a practice of active mourning to be important in the collective bearing of human responsibility for extinction, and through a process of acknowledgement and recognition felt that mourning could open doors to changing patterns of behaviour, and ultimately hope.

Creatively I respond by bearing witness to individual animal experiences of living and dying, often those animals found on the road. Using native plants such as nettle, dandelion, daffodil and bindweed, individual shrouds are woven for each animal. Prior to burial each is drawn and recorded, using hand-made pigments from natural foraged materials from the immediate environment of the subject. Together, the weavings, drawings and burials function to metaphorically return the animal to the landscape from which she has been prematurely taken. Ultimately, in challenging dominant Western myths of human exceptionalism and the legitimate grievability of animal bodies, the practice seeks new ways of bringing the dead into communication with the living, to affect change in the ongoing treatment of those animals who remain.

*Jacques Derrida ‘The Animal that Therefore I am' (more to follow)’ 2002

Detail of shroud. Nettle fibre warp with bindweed dandelion stems, plaited and woven