Backyard Wilderness Data Portraits

Backyard Wilderness III: Data Portraits, Casa Arts Centre project space, Lethbridge, Alberta, 2023.

I began working on projects involving our relationship to wildlife as part of the artists’ duo 12 Point Buck (2009-11). I continue to explore it today through exhibitions and public art. Wanting to enrich my understanding of the nature/culture divide, and to use art as a research method, I began my PhD in 2016. People often ask me what I plan to do with a PhD, and I explain that the degree isn’t a means to an academic end but a journey—a process through which I have been able to explore my interests in a supportive and challenging environment. My studies have allowed me to investigate our relationship to urban wildlife and to advocate for coexistence through my art practice.

This project, mixing animal portraits with charts and plots, may be the story of missing the mark. My goal is to create low tech, analog representations that are visually appealing, have people want to know more, read the labels, and begin to make sense of the artwork. I don’t want people to necessarily understand the data completely, so much as I want them to engage, and think about how urban wildlife fits into their lives. Previous exhibitions and public art projects (such as my billboard series) worked to attain this goal, but do these? I am now hoping to gauge reactions to the work, think more about what it is I want to achieve and how best to achieve it, and ponder it all. On one hand, I am a bit like cartoonist Lynda Barry who said, “I found myself compelled—like this weird, shameful compulsion—to draw…animals.” On the other hand, my goal really is all about engaging with audiences. To sum up, it’s all about process and I’m still working through it.