The work is based on a sensory and detail-rich experience of a place. Taking the dog as an excuse to lower our gaze to knee level, it seeks to shift our perspective and draw attention to our surroundings with the help of more senses than sight. A dog is an expert at foregoing a summary gaze in favour of the details of an ice cream stain, the sudden movement of a blade of grass or lipstick on a cigarette butt. What can humans learn from other ways of experiencing the world? How can we disregard the grand narratives in favour of the richness of lived stories and whispered gossip? Which stories would we then tell?
Perhaps animals have agency. Their instinctive and immediate response to society may be a conscious (albeit a different consciousness) way of attempting to change it. They may conspire in silence to finally dispose of humanity and its self-centred hubris. Perhaps this is a fantasy that humans need to train themselves to have? To believe that dogs not only pee because they have to, to communicate or mark out territory, but also to degrade their owner’s house and bushes with their urine. Seagulls shit on windscreens to annoy us, rats peek up from the toilet to scare us and flies land on our faces in pure rage. Or perhaps, the animals simply don’t give a hoot about us humans. We are insignificant to them, and they display their splendour for their own sake.
With the work The Gossip, one gets to train one’s imagination. One’s ability to imagine another world that is already emerging where we stand. We only need to practise paying attention to that which exists but is often filtered out to take on our surroundings with all our senses and experience both ourselves and our environs in other ways.
Most things in the world are lickable, if you give it a go.
