Jurack, B., 2023.
You Look at Me Looking at You Looking at Me
Output Type: | Journal article |
Publication: | Arts |
Publisher: | MDPI AG |
URL: | dx.doi.org/10.3390/arts12020073 |
Volume/Issue: | 12 (2) |
Pagination: | pp. 73-73 |
Repository URL: | e-space.mmu.ac.uk/631747 |
<jats:p>Living and working for a month at the Sanskriti Foundation in Delhi, the artist's life was watched and observed by a group of resident monkeys. This paper is based on notes begun during that studio residency and represents the critical reflections emerging alongside the hands-on sculptural practice. It is illustrated with close-up photographs of the artist's sculpture that asks how encounters with fabled animals in densely populated 21st century urban areas can alter our understanding of the gaze as an inter-species gaze. The sculpture and paper begin to ask broader questions, including how can sculpture provide a different, and perhaps more tacit and empathetic, encounter with the other to enable a physical, mental or spiritual experience of cultural entanglement between the various onlookers? In how far is modelling the other's gaze a form of embodiment and mimicry? Do the fast-changing camera angles and soundtracks of natural history programmes hinder an empathic inter-species encounter? Or, does the slow animation of the artist's sculpted surface heighten a sense of being alongside equally curious, cunning and adaptable others such as crows, foxes and monkeys?</jats:p>