Artist's Statement
Artist's Statement
The almost total triumph, in human culture, of the intellectual and the technical over the sensuous and the mystical has drastically diminished the range and depth of human experience, rendering it insipid; serving up a thin gruel of knowledge without feeling.
This obsession with the merely intellectual has threatened to take over the visual arts in the form of the worst examples of conceptual art that are creating 'a tide that threatens to deposit us on some distant shore, visually insensible' (Lyle Rexer).
Feeling is my subject.
In creating images of animals, I have little interest in what the animal looks like; in the animal as subject. Rather my interest is in what the animal is - or might possibly be.
Through these images, I am interested in exploring two questions: How do I feel in relation to this animal? And, more interestingly, what could be the experience of being this animal?
To borrow: 'The wolf is not fundamentally a characteristic, or a certain number of characteristics: it is a wolfing' (Deleuze and Guattari).
In a world obsessed with 'fact', science and analysis, the animal is reduced to an object - a set of describable characteristics. As a result, our thinking has become narrow, superficial and objectifying - the description of physical and behavioral characteristics in turgid language and so-called 'factual' imagery. We delude ourselves that, in describing, we know and understand.
My aim is to use images - and texts - to break out of this superficial reductionism. We do not know. We can never know. But we can try to feel. We can try to re-define our relationship with animals beyond the merely factual to include the emotional, the sensuous and the mystical.
Ultimately, my interest is in exploring how these images affect our cultural perception of animals and the impact on our deeper relationship with these 'unlike others'. I believe that our relationship with those that are unlike us define what we are as human beings. It is how we define ourselves in relation to these animals that will ultimately determine whether we continue to share this world with them or whether we will sweep them aside to make way for our ever-growing, useless consumption.
Joe Zammit-Lucia