Dr Paul Finnegan

My art practice stages encounters between animals, spaces and objects through the form of digital moving image. These works aim to create liminal spaces between human and non-human worlds. They turn negative encounters between animals and made objects into ecologically active ones. I build props that reference architecture, machines and cultural artefacts that are then activated by the movement of animals. The animals in the works are unruly – transgressing the nature-culture boundary. Sometimes the props and constructs reference modern sculpture, in an attempt that art history itself may encounter its non-anthropocentric other. The works thus show human places, spaces and meanings taken over in spontaneous acts of more-than-human world-making. In places the tools of digital moving image are themselves explored for their ability to register movement, such as where motion tracking is used to translate animal movement onto artificial forms. The moving image works speculate on a characterisation of human-animal relations understood as post-natural relations.