Please join artist and anthropologist Hermione Spriggs and artist Laura Cooper to explore bird experiences of the air and exchange ideas on how rethinking animal-human relations can be passed on through art and design education.

What kind of art would a falcon enjoy? What might be its aesthetic tastes, its conceptual conundrums? How might our ideas around these themes provide new material for the visual arts classroom?

Aimed at those working in education at all levels, and led by artist/filmmaker Laura Cooper and artist/anthropologist Hermione Spriggs, this visual arts workshop playfully explores the possibility of making art for birds. It engages with bird perspective, and how we might act with greater sensitivity to the technological and natural environments that surround us.

During the workshop participants will explore physical movement exercises drawn from falconry that communicate with birds of prey. We will conduct hands-on experiments making wearable textiles and flags that communicate specific messages between species using a “predator eye” aesthetic. We will engage with visual strategies of visual mimicry and decoy use across the human and animal kingdom. We will discuss the ecology of predator-prey relations in London’s suburbs, and the ethics of human-bird interactions in domestic, public and private airspace. We will endeavor to construct “artworks” for raptors.

About Hermione Spriggs and Laura Cooper

Hermione Spriggs and Laura Cooper come together for special projects as the Anthropology of Other Animals. “AoOA” is a multi-species conversation dedicated to discussion and experimentation around our collective status as human animals. The Anthropology Of Other Animals has developed in alliance with The Political Animal Reading Group (The Showroom, London/Dublin), Land Art Mongolia (Ulaanbaatar/ Berlin), Titanik Galleria (Turku, Finland), East Side Projects (Birmingham), the Multimedia Anthropology Lab (London), Mildred’s Lane (Pennsylvania) and Emerging Subjects of the New Economy at University College London.

These workshops are part of Air Matters: Learning From Heathrow is an exhibition and programme of events that explores the politics of air.