The Empty Wilderness: Seals and Animal Representation

This paper and the art project on which it draws, (between You and Me, Kalmar Konstmuseum 2009) acknowledges the presence of non-human-animals as co-partners in any human-animal dialogue with landscape. In the light of this, it focuses on the seal, a non-human-animal widely appropriated in Western culture, for a variety of human-animal representations and emotions. The specific geographical context of Iceland, offers access to a multiplicity of human-animal attitudes towards the non-human-animal and so to different conceptions of cultural value bestowed on the non-human-animal, which lead in turn to discrete modes of consumerist engagement. A number of people were interviewed on camera, each having had sustained contact with the seal, by means variously of observation, caring and hunting. From the interviews a variety of pictures emerged, about living with nature, in the past and in the present, but quite commonly resulting in the death of the animal, both physically and metaphorically. The space of encounter between humans and animals is haunted by this eclipse or obliteration. This practical research, conducted as visual art, explores the consequential splitting of the ‘representational’ animal from the ‘living’ animal and how this rupture is manifested as a series of new and seamless constructs