Bête à chagrin (artist book)

Human animals have been living alongside other animals throughout our long history and, for at least 50,000 years, have worked and lived with others—dogs, cattle, horses—and, we can surmise, have for at least this long shared bonds of trust and affection. On average, though, the lifespan of companion and co-working animals is significantly shorter than that of humans, which means that such relationships invariably end in loss. This work addresses the inevitable mourning, and processes of memorialisation. We have sourced photographs of animals that were loved and lost, along with a sentence about some salient feature of each animal. Working with this data we have written prose poems that respond to the supplied photo and sentence. Poetry is a medium ideally suited to elegiac moments, and the shape of the resulting book evokes the constant turn and re-turn that is loss, and recovery, memory and forgetting.