Julia Oldham's Page

Website

www.juliaoldham.com

Member type

Artist

If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?

Video

About my artwork

I always have been a lover of bugs. My earliest memories are of exploring the woods, overturning rocks to find worms, grubs, and slugs. Over the years I have met many insects, spiders, snails, lobsters and other invertebrates whose activities and complex personalities have fascinated me. Can a creature so small and strange experience joy, fear, love or desire?

My work is an attempt to enter the mind of the invertebrate. I want to understand what it feels like to engage in their behaviors, movements and rituals. So I intensely study invertebrates—I read about them; I watch videos of their movements; I watch live creatures in the wild and in zoos; I talk to beekeepers and scientists. I contemplate the odd gestures of bugs and try to bring them into my world.

Invertebrates engage in enthusiastic, although often inelegant, dances for purposes of mating and communication. Humans are similarly inclined to dance in order to communicate an idea or invite sex; and so I use dance to bridge species.

I translate invertebrates’ rituals into choreography that I perform, unpracticed, in front of the camera. During my engagement in these dances, a strange system emerges as I try to remember which movement to perform next. The dance begins to feel oddly intuitive, but never graceful. The resulting videos are concerned with playful anthropomorphization. They are meditations on the fantasy that humans and invertebrates have a shared set of experiences, accessible through awkward, hybridized dance steps.

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http://www.artreview.com/profile/JuliaOldham
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