Birds & Beasts of the British Countryside
2023-ongoingA series of hand-painted photographs of dead animals encountered during Daniel & Clara's daily walks in the countryside. Each work is a uniquely painted c-type photograph with the name of the species along with place and date found inscribed in white india ink.
“Since we moved to the countryside in 2020, we often encounter dead animals during our daily walks, sometimes roadkill, sometimes the remains of another animal’s meal, and sometimes the body in an apparently pristine condition, the cause of death a mystery. We always feel a strange combination of repulsion and a desire to look. We found ourselves compulsively taking photographs each time we'd see a dead animal but it took us a while to know what we would do with these pictures. Painting became a way to have a deeper engagement with the subject and to bring into the photograph (a mechanical record of death) a vitality of life while lived (the marks of our conscious living engagement, and our empathetic leap into the dead animal’s experience).”
- Daniel & Clara
“We've been thinking a lot about historical depictions of dead animals, particularly still lives from the 18th/19th century. The animals depicted were hunted or farmed for food and presented as demonstrations of abundance and wealth. Our pictures differ in that these animals are wild and found dead in the landscape, photographed as we found them. These are still lives born at the other end of the industrial revolution and under the atmosphere of the climate crisis – they are personal meditations on the lives and deaths of the animals that live unseen around us.”
- Daniel & Clara
