Mermaid

Mermaid is a video work, exploring the relation between the human/animal/machine. It proposes that this relationship can be understood as multiple. The mermaid in this image (as artificial) is in morphing and conjoining with various animal/fish forms not in order to secure meaning that characterized animal symbolism in the 19th century, but ‘serves to resist or displace fixed meaning’ as Steve Baker puts it in his book ‘The Postmodern Animal’. The work does not merely represent animal forms but uses the animal as a creative space to generate hybrid sensibilities in-between the human and the animal. These in-between sensibilities are not imitative, but sites of ambiguity generating empathy and affect. The encounter between the human and animal form in this video allow for ‘non-human, non-pedestrian movement in the strange imaginative spaces of the animal’ (Baker) which transforms unitary identity and dismantles the perspective of human mastery over the animal. This video aims therefore to produce for the viewer a movement towards the animal in a more empathetic mode and at the same time provoke them to question the boundaries that constitute the relations between one form and another.

This research is informed by the process described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as the ‘becoming-animal’. They state that a ‘becoming’ is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between (Deleuze & Guattari, ‘A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia’). Here Throp describes an mythical underwater world as fluid, charming but disturbing.

This work is part of Mo Throp's ongoing research into subjectivity and identity informed by feminist theory, particularly that of Luce Irigaray.

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