Artist Statement - Mori

Based upon the tips in a previous blog post about how to write an artist statement, please find mine based on my current project Mori after the page break.

Mori by Lorna Rollings

An Artist Statement

Mori, meaning “to die” in Latin, covers my personal exploration of something that I have conflicting views on: field sports, i.e., pheasant shooting.

I am a vegetarian and have a pro-animal rights stance, however, many forms of “cruel sports” have been in my family for generations. As a child, my father would go rabbiting using ferrets with his uncle in Devon; my uncle travels to different parts of the country to compete in fishing competitions; and within the last few years, my father would take our dog to a local pheasant shoot. Our dog was put to sleep earlier this year, but my father has returned to the shoot to continue beating. It is not uncommon during the winter months to find dead birds hanging in our tool shed, ready to be plucked and eaten.

I wanted to make this project after being inspired by the idea of completing a photography project around a culture that you are not a part of. As mentioned before, this project has a double meaning due to my disjoint from similar activities carried out by members of my family. I have also wanted to complete a photography project using dead animals in some way, either road-kill or taxidermy, and this project is the perfect opportunity to do so.

My final images will comprise of a still-life of a dead pheasant shown opposite a portrait of one of the “guns” or beaters. Practitioners such as Tamany Baker, Taryn Simon, and Rineke Dijkstra have influenced the direction that the final images will take, in terms of still-life using dead animals and the corresponding portraits.

The themes of my work include conflict, death, and pleasure. Conflict, due to the disjoint between the older generations of my family's interests and my own. The death of the birds – the fact that I see them as living beings with lives, emotions, and feelings not dissimilar to those of a humans – is something that is done for pleasure: the birds are killed not as a solution to overpopulation, but as a recreational pastime, and to be eaten.

I feel that the work will represent how I see the birds: graceful, beautiful, and peaceful in death, juxtaposed by being displayed next to a portrait of someone who has been a part of them losing their lives.