Some words on Dog-Eared Paradise!
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You are happily invited to experience our current online exhibition Dog-Eared Paradise by artist Olivia Normile, running our our site until December 14th!
Olivia Normile is a visual artist based in Dublin. Her multidisciplinary work is often inspired by elements of theater and fictional storytelling. Through hand-drawn animation and installation processes, she explores gestural communications and non-human perspectives.
She has received support from Dublin City Council and the Arts Council through funding and residencies, most recently an Agility Award in 2022 and 2021. Recent exhibitions include Matters of Table, PeripheriesPOST, Gorey School of Art, 2023, Artworks, VISUAL Carlow, 2023, Deliverables, Pallas Projects/Studios Artist Initiated Projects, 2022. Olivia is currently a visiting lecturer at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) Dublin.
“Dog-Eared Paradise is a gathering of handmade processes that consider the human-non-human relationship. An empathetic approach is taken to consider spaces for animal stories and biographies. An animal theater is conjured, a liberation is staged.”
Most of us take photos of animals. My phone is filled with photos of squirrels I’ve encountered in parks, people’s pets, and birds too, always a seal if I spot one. These often blurry (and haphazard) photos stay inside my phone, behind the glass… a select few making appearances on my Instagram. How rewarding to experience the considered space that Olivia has created in this exhibition, where animals take centre stage. Literally. Not in a nature documentary way. Here, there is a distinctly human and domestic influence.
Despite existing on an enclosed website, there is a sense of world-building and spaciousness. The animals are positioned within depictions of human environments that the artist has re-envisioned for this virtual, animal-centric world. As you move through the show, you can expect to see specific tonal investigation, playful visuals and gentle pacing.
The project addresses the human-animal relationship, animal narratives and ideas of animal liberation. In the scenes evoked by the display, a human visual language is present. Animation, drawing, interactive visuals, gifs, audio, film, and photography. The work seems to gesture that the featured animals are finding some elbow room within this created space for their own narratives. There is looseness and sketchiness. Tactile, paper-led processes are used to stage an animal theatre, where handmade interventions quietly interrogate ideas of human-animal interdependence. Depictions of stages and natural history museum-type vitrines provide a physicality of human power, control, re-enactment, enclosure and storytelling.
When Olivia first brought her initial research to us, the first thing that sprung to mind was Anselm Kiefer’s vitrines that are installed in the Pantheon, in Paris. The idea of encapsulating a story behind glass walls. The vitrine as an appropriated art object has been around for a long time (Joseph Beuys - over and over!). Kiefer’s enclosed sculptural works reflect stories from the trenches of WWI. Scenes are constructed through barbed wire, stalks of wheat, and blocks of cement, all emblematic of the materials of his practice. Dog-Eared Paradise is far removed from thinking about the trenches, but it does tackle storytelling and perhaps commemoration in a similar (if peripheral) way. Stories behind glass, commemorating a narrative or journey, paired back visuals, objects held in stasis in emblematic materials of the artist (like stage props), all gesturing towards the stories of others. Nice to join these dots sometimes.
Through the various sections, or pages of the web installation, we witness vignettes from the constructed story of the liberation of a rabbit. The materials used are recognizably Olivia’s; paper-focused, cutouts, analogue. The photography is a newer element, lending strongly to the digital display. Viewers can easily absorb the ‘magazine feature’ or biographical aesthetic that is present. It feels historic. There is a formality at work, despite the sweet rabbits and playful, crafty tone. Are our laptops and phone screens acting as one interconnected vitrine to view this work?
More art that springs to mind when considering this project is the famous 'The Hunt of The Unicorn’ tapestry series that is displayed in The Cloisters Museum in New York. I was lucky enough to see the tapestries last year and have been reflecting on them ever since. The old-world collaborative act of weaving tapestries really interests me. Stage-like and filmic scenes woven in wool and silk (more animal presence!). Storytelling through the fabric. The Unicorn series is a breathtaking example of medieval tapestry weaving - and like most medieval tapestries, steeped in mystery (who made them? what do they mean?!! etc). The animal-human focus and the highly theatrical depiction of the animal hunt are what I am linking to Dog-Eared Paradise. Also the sense of mystery, storybook-style playfulness within formality, and highly considered visual outcomes. The various fictional scenes of the Unicorn hunt are played out across seven tapestries. Olivia’s web installation takes a similar format, there is a trail to unravel webpage by webpage.
Humans have long been weaving narratives around hunting, domesticating, and possessing animals. Depictions of ‘the hunt’, be that of mythical creatures or of wild animals are nothing new, rigggght back to cave art. The theatrics of hunting, the drama, the costume and pageantry! are all very ‘human’ things. Dog-Eared Paradise subverts this attitude to animal narrative in art and exists instead in a kind of parallel space, with an alternative non-human perspective elevated. In the final tapestry of the medieval Unicorn series, pictured above, the elegant Unicorn has been captured, and despite bleeding capture wounds, it appears content and resting in its new enclosure. In Dog-Eared Paradise, an enclosure is breached, and a liberation is staged - we hope, for freedom for the rabbit, as it also appears happy at the end.
Olivia’s work often occupies a dream-like space, where communication occurs visually through gestures, recurrent shapes and movements. These act as a method to dig into deeper or more intrinsic thinking on how things exist, move and communicate in space. She creates characters for her explorations through shapes and motifs or in this case, animals. She considers and values non-human existences, and thinks about how they might act with a spotlight shone on them, always with a sense of magic or an unexplainable dynamism.
I am happy to report that the featured rabbits in this exhibition, in real life, have actually been liberated from lives they were not happy in. Labbie, Pumpkin and Cara now live comfortably in a rescue home. Evelyn, from Rabbit Rescue Ireland, kindly allowed Olivia to visit the rabbits and gently photograph and film them for this project. Thank you to Evelyn!
Dog-Eared Paradise is a fantastically developed web installation featuring Olivia's spacious new thinking. The website acts as a testing ground for new ideas, iterations and installations, very exciting to think about where this project goes next.
Hopefully, my musings have helped lead you down the Dog-Eared Paradise path!
Enjoy the show.
View the exhibition here.
Ellen O’Connor, screen service.