Sheepology

‘Becoming-animal’, a concept devised by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, provides me with a springboard to explore new insights and perspectives outside the human experience. As an art practitioner, I enter paradoxical spaces between the wild and the domestic, to encounter non-human animals. Through shape-shifting and attuning to local ecologies, I enter these entangled worlds using both a playful and serious intent. I use a camera switched to auto and other technologies to create films and sound works from these multispecies alliances and to consider what it might be like to be non-human. These then undergo a transformative process and are given space to become something beyond my control. Ultimately, they create alternative ways of seeing and thinking about interspecies relationships. Sheepology, a film and sound work to emerge from this process, offers the viewer an opportunity to move across the human–non-human boundary, into other alien worlds and domains, to become undone and co-inhabit a multispecies environment. I plan to examine the implications of these multispecies alliances for creating a shift in awareness of the biodiversity emergency.