Animal made objects (work-in-progress)

Moving between subjectivity and objectivity in relation to our own work is a difficult trick. To create is to be immersed in the world of our own experience: to comment is to sit owl-like on a branch outside oneself. I worry that commenting on my work might deprive someone of a job, spoil the interpretive journey, close down possibilities, and take me away from my own creative process. I worry that spending time making work detracts from the important things I need to say that I could just get on and write a journal article about. I ask myself why I need to spend hours and days tracing the lines of the shatter, and what is revealed in that process that might otherwise remain hidden: in my emerging relationship with my subject?

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But before practice-as-research I was trapped in an apparently irreconcilable binary distinction. For me, the binary that is constituted by ‘practice’ and ‘research’ was exemplified by two masters degrees, spaced a decade apart, in creative writing and public health. This binary represented an impossible decision: an inner battle between the opposing aspects of an apparently split persona. Practice-as-research showed me that this opposition was given, not chosen: constructed, not innate.

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Erica Fudge is Professor of English at the University of Strathclyde, and her particular interest is the intersection between animal and renaissance studies. She has proposed 'animal made objects' as active presences in the world, and invokes actor network theory and thing theory in suggesting the continuing presence of the animal in the object made from its carcass. The wearing of animal skin marks us as all-powerful while simultaneously and paradoxically highlighting our frailty: thus in needing to protect our own skins, we are 'not what we might hope to be'. In changing subject-object relations, it is 'what animal skin does to a human, and not what a human does to an animal, that is important'. The 'animal made object' becomes a thing that alters the wearer.

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What then is the significance of the juxtaposition of the snakeskin handbag and the shattered glass? Was it the life of the snake that was shattered, or my own when I came across this window, and is the image itself now an 'animal made object' that contains the snake and alters the person who views it? Does it matter that this photograph was taken by a British vegan wandering the streets of Florence, and what is the relationship between the imposition of the window and the refusal of the Italian government to recognise the EAT-Lancet report, or the Italian suggestion that raising your child on a vegan diet should be punishable by four years in jail? As the mother of two vegan children, what was my lived experience of wandering these streets, and how and why did this window speak to me?