Co-Prosperity is thrilled to present Of Love: A Labor, a solo presentation of Ruth Burke’ installation in our window space. What are the textures and traces of care? How do labours of love materialize? Of Love: A Labor, a solo exhibition by the interdisciplinary artist Ruth K. Burke, attends to the tactile remnants of domestic interspecies relationships. This is not an exhibition about animals but of animals, and emerges in relation with animals. As is the habit of art history, non-human animals are all too often obscured by the powers of their own symbolism. Their transmutation into metaphor distracts us from their vibrant material lifeways that permeate earthly existence.
Burke’s practice, more broadly, interrogates how we might challenge these objectifying paradigms, and instead care-fully invite animals into artistic practice as active agents and co-producers. This is embedded within the context of agricultural animal husbandry in the American Midwest. The word husbandry derives from the Old Norse husbondi or ‘house dweller’, which evokes proximity and duration. For millennia, draft animals have lived and worked alongside humans, shaping the land, shaping bodies, shaping ethical questions of power, of labor, of kinship. Here in Illinois, the ancestral lands of native peoples including the Peoria, Illini, and Myaamia nations, draft animals also pull the heavy load of settler colonialism, as they were once instrumentalized as key tools of the colonial project. Burke is concerned with how draft animal power may be harnessed otherwise, and how oppressive human power might be shifted and softened in these domestic contexts. Through installation, performance, and large-scale earthworks created in collaboration (co-laboring) with animals and plant-life, Burke attends to how non-human agencies might partake in and sustain art-making practices for collective acts of multispecies worldbuilding.
Every installation that makes up Of Love: A Labor emerges as residue from the relational practice of living alongside animals and engaging in the labor of animal husbandry. Living on a farm in rural Illinois alongside her many companion species, including horses and a team of oxen, Ruth understands labor as a collective and interdependent process. Reflecting upon how the oxen haul countless bales of hay and straw for themselves and the horses to eat, aerate the compost broken down by a host of decomposer species, and plow, disc, and fertilize the kitchen garden, she acknowledges that: “Our work together sustains our life together.” Ruth attends to the remnants of these daily cycles of care-labor with a sculptural sensibility. Transforming ubiquitous materials and processes into relational meditations, she considers an aesthetics of interspecies care that bares an ephemeral tenderness. As Burke puts it: “I think and feel through my body when I'm working with the animals. Like the ability to measure 20 lbs of alfalfa hay without a scale, I'm trying to bring an attuned kinesthetic-haptic knowledge into the studio and making process”. On the gallery floor lies trails of scattered hay and furls of carefully coiled bailing twine and netting. The swirling, fluid arrangements echo the cyclical flow of interspecies care routines, but a closer look tells us that the threads catch, twist, and knot. The contours of care are not always smooth, they are punctuated by power, conflict, refusal, and grief. Our knotty species entanglements bind us materially and emotionally, and yet to attend to them is often complex and contradictory, and therefore requires an ethics rooted in difference.
Installed behind the main gallery window is a large-scale digitally collaged mural, which presents a durational mapping of cow licks shared between Ruth’s bovine companions known as ‘allogrooming’. Markings are produced by rough curling tongues gliding across downy hair, leaving behind undulating furrows of affection in kaleidoscopic coats – an ephemeral inscription of animal language. A layer of twine running across the photographic panels traces the shape of the ‘flight zone’; an animal handling model that demarcates a herd animal’s personal space, which if encroached upon whilst handling may cause alarm or ‘flight’. For Burke, this concept becomes a metaphor for the precariousness of relational thresholds, human and more than human, which are constantly established and re-established in the complex dance of relating. “I'm thinking about how we human animals also share flight and pressure zones in common with bovines, '' Burke says. “For both species, these thresholds are sites where we negotiate consent, pleasure, pain, and trust.” These species thresholds become particularly fragile when bodies occupy a state of discomfort or trauma, and an interspecies empathy requires care-full attention to the haptic experience that defines such bodily boundaries.
The coiling twine, and the intimate palimpsests of cow-lick-love-language, are motifs that are repeated throughout the exhibition. Repeated rituals of care. Rhythms of care. The rhythms of two young oxen chewing their cud on a video screen on the gallery wall. How we attune to non-human rhythms is at the heart of Burke’s wider practice, and Of Love: A Labor gently invites the viewer to feel into the textures and tenderness of a relational world that subtly reverberates through its materialization in the gallery space.
- Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp
Artist Bio
Ruth Burke is an interdisciplinary artist, from and of the Midwest, who collaborates with animals in her creative practice. She is a teamster, farm laborer, professor, equestrian, and cultural worker. Straddling the practice of contemporary art and the fields of human-animal studies, and agriculture, Burke has exclusively focused on human-animal relationships in her practice since 2015. In addition to exhibition, her current focus is a series of large-scale native plant earthworks powered by animal traction.
Ruth Burke recently received the 2022 ISU University-level Creative Arts Initiative Award, which recognizes scholars with exceptional promise early in their careers, and is a 2024 Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education (SARE) Partnership Award Grantee. Burke has been a resident artist at ACRE, Detroit Community School, and was a fellow in the 2017 inaugural cohort at the Animals & Society Institute. Burke has presented her work at venues and institutions nationally and internationally, co-authored works in peer reviewed journals, created earthworks in three US states, and received numerous grants from various entities.
Ruth Burke holds a BFA from the Ohio State University, and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Video Art in the Wonsook Kim School of Art at Illinois State University.