Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications

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Author: Laird, Tessa × End date: 2024 × Start date: 2020 × Type: Journal Article ×

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    Pretty polyglot: parrotisation as the difference in repetition, again
    Laird, T (Unlikely, 2023)
    This paper was written on Kulin Country — moving between the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri, Boon Wurrung, and Dja Dja Wurrung peoples. On Kulin Country, birds are powerfully symbolic: Bunjil, the creator spirit, travels as a wedgetail eagle, and Waa, the protector, travels as a crow. Even the humble parrots, as Wurundjerri knowledge holder Mandy Nicholson reminds us, are Bunjil's children, and they carry Bunjil's messages, for those who know how to listen.
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    A Bat’s End: The Christmas Island Pipistrelle and Extinction in Australia, by John Woinarski, CSIRO Publishing, 2018.
    Laird, T (Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2020)
    This is a favourable review of Woinkarski's 'A Bat's End', using the book's message of conservation of endangered species to underline the plight of many animals after the bushfire season.
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    Digesting Gut Feelings - A Conversation
    Goodman, A ; Laird, T (Unlikely, COVA, University of Melbourne, La Trobe University, 2020)
    This is a discussion between artist Andrew Goodman and critic Tessa Laird about his work 'Gut Feelings' in the exhibition Translating Ambiance curated by Jordan Lacey. Lacey curated a number of sound artists looking at ambiance and the natural world in relation to the urban environment. Rather than imagining nature 'out there', Goodman turned to nature inside his own body - the millions of microbes dwelling in his gut, and made recordings of those noises. These sounds were then made not just audible but palpable through a vibrating speaker that viewers could feel as they listened. This raised pertinent questions around interactivity, ecological art practices, and how we can better attune to the environment.
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    [Review] Deborah Bird Rose. Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 240 pp.
    Laird, T (University of Wollongong Library, 2021-01-01)
    Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(2): [Review] Deborah Bird Rose. Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 240 pp.
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    Zoognosis: When Animal Knowledges Go Viral. Laura Jean Mackay’s The Animals in That Country, Contagion, Becoming-Animal, and the Politics of Predation.
    Laird, T (University of Wollongong Library, 2021-01-01)
    This paper proposes a creative neologism: zoognosis, with an added g, to indicate that knowledges can be transmitted virally from animals to humans. If so, what are the animals trying to tell us? Laura Jean Mackay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) provides an opportunity to find out. Mackay’s prescient novel was written before, but published during, the COVID-19 pandemic, and is about a ‘zooflu’ that enables the infected to understand animals. The author has forged a poetic language based on animal sensory perceptions, what ethologist Jakob von Uexküll termed Umwelten. In doing so Mackay effects a ‘becoming-animal’ of the text, reintroducing readers to their own animality. Mackay’s ‘perspectivism’ enables us to see from the point-of-view of non-human animals, forcing a reckoning with animal abuse and extractive lifeways. While her speculative fiction is bleak, it offers tools for attunement and thinking-with non-human others.