A small hand drawn and bound book that I made about biodiversity and species decline. Animals appear on and off pages to signal disappearance, as well as there are also being random blank spaces/pages to signify extinction.

The book is titled ‘Where We Found Our Metaphors’ and is also inspired by a conversation between Krista Tippett and Michael McCarthy that I have copied from the ‘On Being’ podcast series.

Ms.Tippett: Ok, sorry, right, I - 500 generations of what we call civilisation and the 50,000 generations when we were part of nature, and your argument is that that is “where we evolved; where we became what we are, where we learned to feel and react, “ “where the human imagination formed, “where we found our metaphors and similes.” And that’s - it’s not an idea that I had ever heard expressed that way, but as you lay it out, it - in the way you’re talking about it, it makes sense in my body, what you’re describing. That that is still defining us.

Mr. McCarthy: The idea is not mine, and it’s not new. It’s about 40 years old. It’s a perception that comes from evolutionary biology - that’s the neo-Darwinism of the late 20th century, and a particular branch of that, which is evolutionary psychology, which has been going, really, since about the 80’s. And the core perception of evolutionary psychology is that 50,000 generations that preceded us in the Pleistocene, which is the age of the Ice Ages, when we became what we are as part of the natural world - when we were wildlife, of you like; we don’t think of ourselves as wildlife anymore, but we were wildlife then - that those generations are more important for our psyches, even now, than the 500 generations of civilisation which have followed the invention of farming about 12,000 years ago. So that there is a legacy deep within us, a legacy of instinct, a legacy of inherited feelings, which may lie very deep in the tissues - it may lie underneath all the parts of civilisation which we are so familiar with on a daily basis, but it has not gone; that we might have left the natural world, most of us, but the natural world has not left us.

Illustrated poetry book. Featuring some selected images.

The animal refugee, the body of the animal, on the edge, perhaps adrift, an island, slipping under, away from our sights and existing in oceanic consciousness, imagination.

In my book Animal Islands, my aim was to depict a story about emerging, imagined and perhaps, even science fiction ecologies, as well as scientific facts I discovered from my research and a bringing in a being from classical and folkloric literature with accompanying poems to inform the viewer about existing ecological connections as well as displaying imaginary dystopian ones inspired by my research, therefore, producing a book that aimed to display a visual as well as a written poetical narrative tangled with science, poetry, folklore and imagination.

Water, once like many animal species, was worshipped and placed in high regard.

Water was and still is in some cultures believed to house many secrets such as otherworldly beings.

In ancient Rome, water was believed to be a doorway into another world, and some animals, such as birds amongst other living beings as well as some formations were to have believed to be augurs, messengers of spirits, gods or something of non-human nature.

I have discovered that water was and in some cases still is in some cultures, believed to have housed water elementals, spirits sometimes known as Undines, these were to have believed to have of existed and/ or dwelled in or around water bodies - and in many cultures water is still regarded as mystical and an important resource, one of which many cultures and species have evolved alongside with, and their stories too.

We ourselves are housing water, our bodies are temporary, but water is always at a constant. Although water can be displaced or change states, the more superstructures that enter the oceans and waterways displaces water, ending up somewhere else, I find it fascinating how old earths water is.

Boria Sax writes in his book Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human “in creation myths from Egypt, Mesopotamia Greece and Northwest Africa, water is the original element of which the world emerges.”

Along with, “more recently, the seas and oceans may be said to be the major metaphor in psychoanalytical theories for the unconscious mind, with its apparently placid surface that hides abundant activity.”

And this connects me to thinking about Patrick Harpur’s ‘Daimonic Reality’ where Harpur writes about the collective unconscious as being oceanic – and as consciousness as being small island rising out of a vast oceanic fluidity.

During this project, I was thinking about animals, animals that have fallen or risen, animals who have made the world what it is, animals who have changed the course of rivers, keystone species, animals on which the backs of civilizations grew or that were considered godlike.

Animals that enter the unconscious a lot – and animals that exist in human lives on different levels of consciousness.

Animals are like islands that fall in out of dreams and consciousness. Animals perhaps will always be in the human mind, even if they are not here anymore.

The scientific philosopher Vinciane Despret says that 'animals are good to think with' and that 'I knit stories in the hope of making us more sensitive, more creative, more porous....'

Despret explains that she tries to understand the point of view of the animal.

I tended to research into animals that were animals that seemed to be like story vessels, animals that are interwoven into the human histories stories being that some of those same animals that have fallen from that stature and their bodies turned into creatures of commodity or have been or are weaponised for human warfare. The shift in our attitudes towards wildlife or animal familiars. Who we take with us into the future and who we leave behind.

I researched back into early civilizations in order to see what human stories had been placed on certain animals. I began to look into augurs and augury.

A type of practice where the animal's behaviour or entrails are examined by an augur to predict certain events in nature such as weather phenomena, that civilizations successes or downfalls or the plans of certain individuals. The humans who then make decisions for that particular civilization based on the findings from that animal.

Thinking about augury and the type of augury we see today - where we see that animals are telling us about our environmental situation. The things they tell us about our planetary health. Augury still exists.

Please drop me an email if you would like to purchase a copy of this book. victorialucyillustration@gmail.com

A European eel created as a submission towards the Eelsuitcase Project which is raising awareness about the plight of the European eel. Please head on over to the project's site to learn more about this fascinating creature which is sadly, in species decline and the type of regenerative work that is taking place to bring back European eel species back.

To see more weird and wonderful eels from the suitcase please head over to https://eels.cargo.site/Home

Publications

My Eel illustration printed in ‘A Suitcase full of Eels’.

Cover artwork by John Kilburn.

Facts about European eels.

Much of the European eels life history was a mystery for centuries as fishermen never caught anything they could identify as a ‘young eel’.

Juvenile eels are called glass eels and in today’s market, they fetch a high price. Larvae metamorphose into larval stage ‘glass eel’ followed by metamorphose into ‘elvers’. Next, they become known as a ‘yellow eel’.

Wild eels can live one hundred years or more.

Eels are becoming more heavily farmed unable to complete the inherent migration they all have locked inside them.

The Sargasso Sea is the spawning ground for European eels, but no one knows exactly where.

Like every other ocean animal, the eel fishery is collapsing worldwide.

Mass consumption of glass eels is driving down the numbers to historically low levels leading eels to be listed by the Convention on International trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the first post-larval stage when they are about four to five centimetres in length. The current price for glass eels is a few hundred dollars per pound.

My own experience with eels has been a very good one. I have many fond memories of flying slowly underwater above the garden eels, these are a smaller species of eel which remain partially in the ocean floor. They move with the current gently to feed with synchronicity, like one organism, it is beautiful to witness. It is like a dance.

About a year ago I watched a documentary by the artist and naturalist James Prosek, Prosek travelled to New Zealand to investigate the decline of New Zealand eels, witnesses eels which a very sacred to the Maori elders which take children out to meet the eels and listen to ancestral stories about them (there exist a multitude of fascinating myths and folk stories about these beings!).

An elder cries exclaiming the eels do not deserve what is happening to them, as sadly many eels lives are cut short in the hydroelectric dam installations which now pepper the rivers of New Zealand.

The baiji dolphin is an extinct dolphin that existed in the Yangtze River.

The baiji was nicknamed 'goddess of the Yangtze'

The dolphin was declared as officially extinct in 2006. It was a quiet extinction and conservation efforts were late, as the action plan was only approved in 2001. The extinction was declared as the first global megafaunal extinction in over fifty years.

Reasons for the animal's extinction vary - from pollution to overfishing and the nearby construction of the megastructure Three Gorges Dam.

There was once a time where the dolphin was regarded as a national treasure of China and illustrations of the dolphin were depicted on postage stamps and coins.

Local folklore tells of a human story on the dolphin in which that there was once there was a poor girl who lived with her stepfather on the banks of the Yangtze. He took her on a boat one day intending to sell her at a market. A storm arose and the boat sank drowning the girl. A bodhisattva of compassion named Guanyin took pity on the drowned child and changed her into a white dolphin. The dolphin was a local emblem of peace and prosperity.

Three Gorges Dam is the largest dam worldwide. It took over 40,000 workers to construct and it produces 20.000 megawatts of power.

To begin with, the river which roughly spans two kilometres had to be diverted, over 1.3 million people had to leave an area about to be flooded. Protesters were met with police brutality, and many arrests were made.

The Three Gorges mega dam is the first of a whole series of mega dams that are under construction in China. 1,350 villages were submerged and 50,000 acres of land behind the dam have been flooded.

In eastern Asian folklore, the yak is regarded as the bringer of rivers and mountains. The hump of a yak resembles a mountain peak. Yak physiology shows that yak is well adapted to high altitudes and have physical difficulty at lower altitudes. A river flows down from the hump of the yak, the river basin represents the heart of the yak where all nutrients, sediments, fry fish, and pure mountain water flows out to sea. Below the mountain, in the valley, there are living populations of humans and non-humans survive by the river basin. The udders represent the area where the water is flushed out to sea - the mouth - The pattern covering the body of the yak represent life as fractal and things are not separate in this world but work fractally.

We live in a throwaway society and culture, the vulnerability of the medium, perhaps also reflecting the vulnerability of the animal world and ecosystems.

The process the paper has undergone, it has transformed, from seed in the soil to tree to pulp to paper, to printer, the life is transformed, metamorphosised and then discarded. As the human-animal, this is what we do, every day, to many animal, plant, mineral and elements.

"Our culture values product. We live in a culture that has very little understanding of - and therefore little value for process." BK Loren

Newspapers possess the most ephemeral quality of all reading materials. I collect my newspaper from inside a shed belonging to shared accommodation where all the residents place it inside the recycling bags. I do not have to purchase it, as it is so readily created and I can find it for free, and once used has no longer given value to it, it is a quick turnover from being manufactured, sold, bought and discarded, much like cardboard and plastic packaging on many products .

Given that paper is so easily attainable, and open to being transformed, it's own becoming through imagination and hands through a process of adding moisture, has been seen throughout the centuries and again more recently in response in the face of political and social disturbance.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/Haiti-Jacmel-papier-mache-parade-180962549/

"But nature can never be a thing. Unlike any object created by humans, nature is always in process. It never is. It is constantly becoming. When it stops becoming, it transforms into not - nature. Then, it is sheer object ( a tree = a chair, an element = a bomb). And in our mainstream culture, objects are either used or discarded." BK Loren

If we are to remove process in nature, we remove a dreaming, a becoming, from our bodies, and the bodies of otherness. You can still have a process through mechanism, but the output or ending is determined. There is no discovery, or rather shedding in certain mechanistic reproductions. We as humans, non-humans and nature are phenomena that shed our interior selves, which alternates and cocreates the variety and shape of physical existences, realms going outwards in spiralling time.

The space between the hand and the eye is sometimes called 'the magic space' where psyche or as Hillman writes 'container' and imagination come into play when tuned in our containers Hillman describes that we are opening up to our wounds and afflictions, with the grief of ongoing species degradation and a sense of loss, witnessing acts of becoming are hugely consoling, art is connected to social change, and a revival of repurposing materials, which in turn reflect a time of how slowing down is detrimental for ongoingness of life. Repurposing what we have as opposed to consuming new is a minor disturbance in the system, a minor disturbance in a mechanised system of waste discarding process and of consumption of new.

Paper is prolifically produced, discarded and recycled and resold cheaply and most today do undergo several generations of a process of recycling through machine.

Paper was once imported from Asia, and mills to produce paper by hand survived in Britain until the industrial revolution. Papermaking is associated with craft and recycled paper making has recently had a resurgence due to the easy obtaining of paper materials. people Those who do seem to continue to re-make by recycling paper by hand sometimes add elements to the paper, such as scent, seeds, flowers and natural dyes, in this process the paper seems to take on an unexpected character of its own, due to the cellulose contained within it. It rather resembles more of what its plant life existence was before in texture. I am choosing to recycle the paper but into a three-dimensional form with which I often have the intention to take on the shape of some animal form.

The tearing and deconstructing and remaking, emerging shapes that change depending on water, salt and air, once dry I paint them, just enough that the original printed script still shows, revealing, as I feel the act of newness is not detrimental I am not attempting to present an entirely shifted object with unrecognisable beginnings, but more to show that it has gone through a re-making, a process that is not quite finished, to celebrate the becoming, but also, in turn, rethink it, reclaim it and relearn it. Nature and soul spirals, it is not a straight line, it goes in circles and unexpected motions, curlicues and turns.

Paper has its own sort of disobedience if you go against the grain of it, I discovered this whilst making pages for a handbound book with my bone folder, the paper informs you by resistance until you go with the grain, the paper continues to push, and many creases and lines are emitted from the intended fold.

Paper, being a cellulosic material meaning the containing of microorganisms, these shift, or dissolve in water, a process that makes recycling paper by hand possible.

The term paper-mâché can be roughly translated as “chewed paper,” presumably because the original paper becomes destroyed to a certain extent (DeVoe 1971).

The slowness of formation, the forms of papier-mache develop at its own speed, a process that adheres to the element of air due to the adage of water.

Drying time depends on the overall atmospheric conditions if left solely to. This can be a slow process, which requires time and patience. The overall end effect is also an unfolding of sorts, much like a body, wetness in this new becoming, like birth and gradual shrinkage, thinness like that discovered in the ageing process.

Kiki Smith, artist of papier-mache "Hard Soft Bodies" (1992) expressed a preference for "Materials that don't have much significance to power."

"Her work illuminated how much paper is like skin, at once frail and robust, susceptible to puncture and able to weather the years. The act of using paper-mâché itself can be read as a pantomime of caring for such bodies: bandaging the skinned knee, wrapping the corpse." - NewYorkTimes

The overall outer exterior of layered papers can resemble that of skin, and such as skin, degrades and weathers over time. Porous and impermanent, unlike gold or metals.

Animals share this vulnerability with paper. Paper animals are found in origami and south-east Asian paper kite making traditions.

"The cause of our suffering is ignorance, a false way of looking at reality, Thinking the impermanent is permanent that is ignorance.

From ignorance is born greed, anger, fear, jealousy and countless other sufferings. The path of liberation is looking deeply at things in order to truly realise the nature of impermanence, the absence of a separate self, and the interdependence of all things. This is the path that overcomes ignorance. that is true liberation." ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Work I created in response to poetry. I created a series of experimental images using small handmade sculpture, glass, water and watercolour. 

I layered the mediums to create an atmosphere and depth to evoke sound, and the memory of light.
 

Hand engraved illustrated crystal glassware. Engraved using a selection of stone, metal and rubbers burs.

Collective exhibition and response to poet Brendan Kennelly's book 'The Man Made of Rain'.

A long poem written after the poet undergoes quadruple bypass surgery, Kennelly enters into some shadowland between life and death.

My poem ‘The Eel’ was published in the Atlantic Press ‘Mouth’ book which features an anthology of illustrated poetry.