Territory
by Featured Artist: Sarah Ronald
Sarah Ronald, TERRITORY (VII), soft pastel and coloured pencil on drafting film, 17 x 22 inches, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
TERRITORY
Sarah Ronald | Oct 2022 | Issue 19
My TERRITORY series is inspired by the visual language of nighttime trail camera footage. These drawings explore subversive themes, particularly around human preferences when it comes to wildlife, both in the real world and representationally. Particularly where the animal and/or its environment seem to blend or disappear altogether, and even in the mediums used for these works, the act of drawing taps into the uncontrollable wild, championing the dark where single identity disappears and we become one with our environment.
With LANDSPEAKERS, I am considering the animal’s innate connection to the environment over time. The dual portraits are a calling to adaptation, a before and after. This series is about the umwelt, or sensory connection of an organism to its environment. This work is in part recognizing that animals have something that most humans desperately seek to consciously feel: an unshakable rootedness and presence to the moment.
I want us to frequently sit alone in the black of night, so to rely entirely on our senses to guide us back to communing with the natural world. The snapping branches, the leaves swaying in the breeze, the unidentified animal calmly sensing you as you sense them, the quiet flap of bats and owls, the grunts of raccoons, the distant coyote yips, and rhythmic crunching of four-legged footsteps passing by, the natural flow of instinct and survival, unimpeded by human hand.
Initially started in 2020 as a vision of encountering and communing with a coyote in the dark, my goal for this project is to build a large hand-drawn animation that includes as many Canadian wild animals as possible.
This analog animation is created by drawing each frame on paper, scanning each drawing, then digitally assembling the scans into the animation you see here. The 2022 version (above) consists of over 600 individual original drawings.
When I present Encounter outdoors at night with a projector, I retitle the piece Encounter Encounter.
The 2022 update is thanks in part to the encouragement one of my long time favourite conservation organizations: The Fur Bearers. I was fortunate to be selected for their first ever Arts Scholarship program.
Sarah Ronald is a Canadian artist living in Port Coquitlam BC, Canada. Ronald’s diverse upbringing in the rural Okanagan shaped her future as a conservation-minded animal artist and aspiring creative writer. After graduating from the Okanagan University College with her BFA, Ronald relocated to the lower mainland of BC, eventually settling in Port Coquitlam, where she now creates out of her home studio.
Always pushing her practice to new levels, in 2020 Ronald started creating hand-drawn animations of wildlife, and in 2021 she began projecting her animations in outdoor spaces as way to encounter her animated animals ‘in the wild’.
A drawer at heart, Ronald has begun incorporating site-specific installation art in her practice, as her aim is to present wildlife and climate concerns beyond traditional art spaces.