Abstract
Feral Practice: the ramifications of making-with in a multispecies world
By Fiona MacDonald, University for the Creative Arts, UK
In 2012, after eighteen years working as a visual artist in London, I moved to a village in Kent. My paper explores the unplanned revolution that took place in my practice and thinking as a result of working with this wildish place. I discuss the role of touch, intimacy and shared vulnerability in my experience of developing a ‘feral practice’, which seeks out intimate co-productions with other species and milieus. My ‘meeting species’ comes through an artistic process of ‘making-with’. What gets produced by these meetings is artwork, but also a series of transformations: in knowledge, aesthetics, agency, relationship. The aesthetics of each artwork become tied to its ethical intent and interspecies context: the artist’s desire and control over the work’s formal qualities must continually adjust to the need for the nonhuman participant/s activity to be elicited and foregrounded. The artist is ‘retrained’. I draw on Haraway, Morton, Martin, Bennett and Plumwood to tease out the tangled affective, agential and ethical questions encountered, and conclude by analyzing the radical shift in aesthetics my work is undergoing via discussion of the ‘expanded painting’ of Laura Lisbon, and Claire Bishop’s critique of participatory practice.
Author keywords
meeting species, feral practice, interspecies co-production, intimacy, vulnerability, touch, aesthetics, participation