Bonita Alice

Strangers of Commanding

Aspect

2015

 

A series of paintings and drawings that explore how we relate to other animals.

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What lies bubbling beneath consciousness, presses up against the resistance to knowing and feeling, causing unexplained anxieties. Without the guidance of feeling, we'reregularly destructive toward beings with whom we've ceased to empathise and whose welfare is wholly dependant on our compassion and better judgement. I have been preoccupied for many years with this denial of feeling and knowing, and the projection that is a core mechanism within emotional denial.

                                                B A

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“They said, ‘It is they in those cattle-cars rattling past.’ They did not say, ‘How would it be if it were I in that cattle-car?’ They did not say, ‘It is I who am in that cattle car.’ They said, ‘It must be the dead who are being burnt today, making the air stink and falling in ash on my cabbages.’ They did not say, ‘How would it be if I were burning?’ They did not say, ‘I am burning, I am falling in ash.’  In other words, they closed their hearts. The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy. that allows us to share at times the being of another. … There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it. “

                J.M.Coetzee – The Lives of Animals

 

We are friends, my dogs and I, in spite of evolutionary discontinuity and because of evolutionary continuity."

      Dale Peterson - The Moral Lives of Animals 2011

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