Feral Attraction – Erasure
Projection, maps, books, vitrine
In this work, a looped video image is projected onto a map of the Tálkni peninsula. It shows a sheep being sheared. On completion of the process, the sheep struggles from the shearer’s grasp and disappears from the edge of the map.
In October 2009, a small flock of feral sheep that had lived independently of humans for some decades on Mt. Tálkni, an inaccessible part of the Westfjords, was rounded up by a team of men and dogs from the neighbouring communities. Observations by local farmers suggested that these sheep possessed some physiological adaptations, including a supposed increase in leg length. Nineteen sheep were caught but five perished as they fell from the towering cliffs. All those captured were taken to slaughter immediately and information concerning their physical changes lost in the process. The incident, and subsequently this work, serve to highlight tensions that surface when our will to categorise and contain meets the will of domestic animals who transgress the invisible and unspoken boundaries that separate landscapes of domestication and wildness.