lockdown (s)talking

Hermione Spriggs & Tamara Colchester

Saturday, February 27, Noon-1PM ET

lockdown (s)talking, a conversation between Hermione Spriggs and Tamara Colchester will take place on Saturday, February 27, Noon-1PM ET, as part of dispersed holdings’ Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair programming.

We (Hermione and Tamara) are friends who have been learning to track animals together. Following their tracks and tracing those of each other has felt like learning a new language, while also helping us navigate lockdown from our respective homes in Yorkshire and Scotland. For us, tracking is about slowing down and paying attention to the quiet presence of the creatures we often miss on our busy human trails. We anticipate talking about tracking as a mode of enquiry, about rural pest control and stalking deer, about listening with our feet, the language of the gut, life, death and friendship and how we find our souls. That's the plan, but like all trails worth following, it's hard to say where we'll end up.

Hermione Spriggs is an artist and researcher exploring practical methods for perspective-exchange. Her work materialises through a series of long-term love affairs with objects such as decoys, traps and lassos that mediate between the worlds of humans and animals. She also hosts a collaborative project the Anthropology of Other Animals (“AoOA”), which doggedly attempts to elicit extraordinary effects from unpromising materials, and explores the hidden links between “craft” and “being crafty.”

Hermione is currently conducting fieldwork with rural pest control in North Yorkshire (UK) for her PhD research based between the UCL Department of Anthropology and the Slade School of Fine Art. She is curator and editor for the exhibition and publication project “Five Heads: Art, Anthropology and Mongol Futurism” (UCL Anthropology/ Sternberg Press). She is convenor of COLLEEX Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation and is a member of UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab, the Social Morphologies Research Unit, and the Arts Catalyst Advisory group. 

https://hermione-spriggs.com/.

Tamara Colchester is a writer and forager interested in the paths between the symbiotic worlds of plants, animals and the separated human. She is currently pondering the usefulness of writing as a mode of exploring the mystery of engagement with other living beings, and is more than a little concerned that writing is always going to be a ‘method at war with the content.’ She hopes not, and is spending as much time as possible away from the computer to follow animal, mushroom and plant trails, seeing where they take her. 

She has co-written a film called Tawai - A Voice from the Forest, that explores the wisdom still held in the rapidly declining old-growth forests of the world. Her first book explored the ancestral patterns within her family system, and her second is set in Scotland and explores the dynamics between predator and prey, and the paradoxical idea that hunters are those who love animals the most.

Working with wild plants and animals keeps Tamara sane and is the way in which embodied silence (not speaking/writing, just tracking) is given formalised attention in her work. She does not believe that there should be any gaps between our work and our life, and is hopeful that the juddering systems of the modern world are opening pathways back into deeper, coherent modes of engaging with the world.