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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>