Policy - Text

The Hunting Box Party

 

This work consists of a series of works including photography, a display case, inside the case there is a display of cards and badges, there is also a wall mural, video and greeting cards pinned to the wall, all these materials relates to a fictitious political party ‘The Hunting Box Party’.

In this work I am interested in how our relationship with nature is a construct of identification with historic cultural traditions, and how these traditions have created an idea of nature and of landscape. The distancing these ‘Hunting Boxes’ represent reduces nature to an object of desire. This is expressed, in this case through issues of observation and hunting, hunting for something which is unobtainable creating the desire.

Hochsitze ~ hunt (raised) hide / hunting box; expresses a particular relationship with nature, which is romantic and depraved at the same time. Romantic in the sense that these ‘Hochsitze’ are designed to hold one or two people, for a period of time out in the woods, you sit and watch nature through a small window, high above the ground. The fact that you then shoot at the animals is a further expression of that romantic relationship, through a desire to obtain/have something, to control and own it.

This work is designed to undermine the idea of the ‘object of art' and introduce a political movement as a context for the making of artwork. Exploring how the mechanics of politics has informed my work. Here the objects are reduced to the status of paraphernalia, their meaning becomes obscured, mixed up with what is suggested they represent.

The placement of this paraphernalia in a case where it can only be observed and not accessed, mirrors the inaccessibility of nature from the hunting box.

The hunting boxes where documented in 2003 at Wiepersdorf in Germany and was made possible through   ‘Fellowship Stipendiatin der Stiftung Kulturfonds’ Residency at Kunstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf, Wiepersdorf, Germany and Culture Ireland 2003 award.