Artist as Animal sees the artist endure an allergen performance across a sea of pollenated, waterlogged, canola fields while wearing high heels and carrying an 8kg cattle gut strung harp. Created at the Art + Ecology CoVA Residency, Agricultural College, Regional Victoria.
Since 1847 the college has been the site of a working farm, which now houses a museum at its heart that documents relics, photographs and registers of the site’s historical, social and scientific significance. The presence and celebration of the changing role of women in Australia during the first and second world wars can be seen throughout the archives. Scanning black and white photos of a class held at the farm of women in weighted skirts and muddied high heels altered my perception of farm practicalities and work experiences instantly.
The interpretive potential of feminist readings of farm life and the prevalence of intensive labour when farming at a time without mechanical intervention—the hours, the sweat, the human and animal power spent—echoed the poetic stoicism across the weathered faces of these photographed women.
The delicate challenge of continuing to create amidst precarious global environmental crises underscored my engagement with the farm and how I chose to make. The residue of these moments is temporally suspended on film where I search with frantic energy through fields, becoming lost, mud-covered, attempting to move forward and find a way through.
Eventually, I arrive at a robotic milking shed, attempt to soothe dairy cattle—the ultimate working mothers—and introduce music to their young. As the cows walked themselves through the sheds and milking took place via machine, the rhythm of their labour moving to and from the fields made the extraction purely transactional.
The resulting moving image work also signifies the geographical distribution of animals—cows were brought to Australia by English settlers during the eighteenth century, for example—and their experience in foreign climates. As a descendant of English colonists in Aotearoa and an immigrant to Australia myself, I can relate to the experience of biological outsider.
This artwork seeks to generate new understandings of farm work and cultural experiences of the landscape by inviting the viewer to consider how the art experience, in its intentionality, communicates both the material conditions of its own making and those of the world it exists within.
Performer: Bobby Calf Dave (Aberdeen Angus)
DP: Gene Alberts
