| Title | 5. ARTISTIC CO-DISCOVERY IN MULTISPECIES COLLABORATION |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Angela Bartram(author) |
| Lee Deigaard(author) | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.63308/63878687083054.ch05 |
| Landing page | https://www.whpress.co.uk/publications/2025/03/04/meam-2/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Bartram+Deigaard |
| Publisher | The White Horse Press |
| Published on | 2025-07-01 |
| Long abstract | Bartram + Deigaard are the collaborative duo of artists Lee Deigaard (US) and Angela Bartram (UK) engaged in a transoceanic, international collaboration and dialogue exploring dualities of mind and being, multi-species empathy and the ethics of animal collaboration. Bartram + Deigaard test the edges, the margins, the overlaps and the interstitial spaces of and within collaboration and interspecies potential ‘doubling(s)’ in their artistic research. Doubling here relates to mirroring and sharing between species, of mind and body, and the myriad divergences that bind through the recognition of this process. Brought together by a shared brain mentality with regard to animal studies, as that which is a recognised field of discourse, and of being and not being, recognising and refusing to affirm the non-human as apart from our common animality, they work sympathetically and empathetically although situated geographically far apart. Born of an openness to involve the non-human fully in creative thinking, making and staging, they create situations of co-learning where all collaborators can contribute and learn from each other, and they willingly embrace the unanticipated shifts to the process each species brings. Using diverse methods, processes and materials, and curious to a myriad of opening potentialities, they explore working as humans from an animal-centric perspective. They bring sensitivities to their research with the non-human animal as both artistic subject and collaborator, of behaving as animal to observe and engage with empathy and openness to the unexpected, and particularly to animal insight and revelation. Iterative long-term projects in photography, video, installation, drawing and printmaking foreground proximity and proprioceptive, nearly devotional studio and caretaking practices centring on respiration and companionate movement. This text explores being mindful and sensible with balancing sympathies and empathies within an often-unbalanced system of agency predicated in environments structured by and for humans (including spaces intended for animal habitation). It discusses the unscripted learning that occurs through interspecies collaboration, and what each animal (human and non-human) can teach the other when both are given full creative agency. Offering examples of their own individual and collaborative work within a critical framework to explain pertinent propositions and findings, it will demonstrate how openness is key for possibilities to flourish. It will discuss how equality and responsive creative co-learning environments can produce revelatory results creatively instigated and directed by the non-human. There are 37 images, of which 27 are combined into nine ‘composites’. |
| Page range | pp. 120–139 |
| Print length | 20 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
| Media | 37 illustrations |
Angela Bartram is an artist and artistic researcher who investigates thresholds of the human body, gallery or museum, definitions of the human and animal as companion species and strategies for documenting the ephemeral. The research, made individually and through collaboration, is made public through exhibitions, events and published texts. Bartram is Professor of Contemporary Art and Co-Lead for the Creative and Cultural Industries Academic Theme and Research Centre at the University of Derby. Amongst other board affiliations, she is Vice President of the Society for Artistic Research and Trustee of the Board of Directors of the Live Art Development Agency. Her Ph.D. in Fine Art is from Middlesex University.
Lee Deigaard explores the topographies where one consciousness encounters another, describing a landscape given shape and substance by its animal protagonists, their sensory and imaginative worlds and their autonomy. With language, photography/video, installation, event and drawing, her work approaches the animal from positions of equality, collaboration and mutual curiosity and looks at multi-species empathy, animal cognition and personality, memory and grief, and the nature of intimacy. As an independent artist, writer and researcher based in urban Louisiana and rural Georgia, she has exhibited and presented her work nationally and internationally. Her writing and artwork have been published in Oxford American, Humanimalia, and Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture among others. She holds degrees from Yale University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Michigan. She is one half of the trans-Atlantic collaborative duos, Bartram + Deigaard and DULSE (with the novelist Mandy Suzanne-Wong of Bermuda).