The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
The issue of animal rights and its focus on the relationship between humans and the animal world is a prickly one and, more often than not, highly politicised. At first glance Barbara Dover’s ‘Animal Matters’ appears to take a less confrontational approach to this theme yet, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that she has an impassioned statement to make, be it personal and/or political. Her assertions, presented through a variety of art forms (printmaking, digital photography, assemblage and installation), may be executed with subtlety, disguised or couched in layered innuendo, but are nonetheless provocative and at times disturbing.
Dover’s use of materials (Perspex juxtaposed against feathers, egg shells, animal hair and fur), the aesthetic and the forms she employs (the repetitive use of Perspex tubes, cubes and cages to denote entrapment and rationalisation), the text invoked to describe the fate of the animals (packaged, mechanised, constrained, reconstituted), her images (haunting photographs of cows and horses), and titles (Breathless, Barrier, Anon), are all very deliberate and act directly upon our sense of right and wrong. No matter where we stand the bovine or equestrian gaze is upon us, uncanny and unrelenting. But, most of all, the work is discomfortingly anthropomorphic: the boundaries between animal and human are blurred and our universal sentience stirred as we look back into the eyes of our fellow creatures.
Using discarded organic animal matter such as cows’ tails, horses’ hair and chicken feathers, together with manufactured and inorganic Perspex, Dover tests the relationships between opposites as she explores the tensions within her theme. Animal remnants have been searched out and saved from the scrap heaps, transported to the suburbs, lovingly washed