Rebecca Selleck
Lapin Plague, 2016
found rabbit skin coats, found carpet and underlay, found chairs, electrics, heat conductive wiring, steel, polyester, synthetic stuffing, enamel paint, plywood
120 x 800 x 500 cm (approximately)
The forms in this work are warm to the touch.
Since I was a small child, I’ve been entranced by the inconsistent relationships humans have with other animals. We can easily empathise with them on the one hand, but disengage on the other: denying them agency and treating them as objects. Representations of non-human animals find their way into our perceptions, but rather than forming a smooth whole they exist in separate parts of our mind ready for appropriate contextual usage.
I use my ongoing practice to reciprocally investigate and challenge my own perceptions within a culture of conflicting truths. I have formed a specific sculptural language that gives communicable presence to the moment my conflicting perceptions and their accompanying sensations clash: The push and pull of empathy and disengagement that results in perceptual dissonance.
Rabbits, in particular, have manifold meaning to us. In ‘Lapin Plague’, I have blurred the contextual boundaries between pest, product and friend in a bodily experience, creating a strangely nostalgic space evocative of Australia’s European ties. I invite viewers to enter the constructed space and interact with the forms. They are soft and inexplicably warm, made from found rabbit fur coats over padded and wired skeletal steel armatures. These skins hold the ongoing agency of the rabbits beyond death and speak of a placement on a hierarchy as commercial objects. In their reappropriation through sculptural form, they are able to communicate a powerful presence to conflicting perceptions of non-human animals.
In plague like numbers they are still and vulnerable, returned a limited semblance of life through warmth and basic form, but lack communicatory organs and substance. They gravitate towards the central chairs, imprints of the human body and symbolic of how our communication constructs the physical and representational world around us.
