Beginning 23/09/2026

Last October I was successful with an application to Lowry's Scratch Night X Climate Hope, curated by artists Sophie King & John Paul (together they are Guardians of Living Matter) I actually had to read the email twice as I initially thought my proposal had been rejected.

The story of Dogxim, the Pampas Fox/ Domestic Dog hybrid had been rolling around my head for a while.

Something in the story made me feel so incredibly lonely. Achingly so.

Here's a link to the National Geographic article about it.

It made me think about what it would be like to have no commonality of experience with another creature. To have no one who saw/smelt/felt things as you did.

A crushing lonilness came over me when I thought about her, this transitional being, not supposed to exist, but somehow existing.

Sterilised because she was a danger, and dead of undertermined causes.

A weird point in the story is that the shelter who was keeping her didn't say anything about her death. A conspiracy! I thought. Or maybe just disinterest. In any case, how desolate to die alone, captured, with your womb torn out.

I'm projecting of course, who knows what she felt. It's hard enough to know what my partner who I have lived with for 5 years feels for real. I can recognize if he's sad, or happy, I know that he can see the same things as me and that his senses work in the same way, but I can never really know what that is like for him.

And Dogxim, a creature who is supposed to be an impossible eventuality, feels so so far away.

But what if we try to imagine what that existence might be like, the existence of a being with a very different nervous, neurological and physiological system. What if we tried to imagine into what it is to feel and see and smell and hear as she does?

Why? Might be an understandable answer to this question. And it is a good question, and the answer is something that expands and amorphises (I realize this is not a word, but I hope you know what I mean) and it is probably something that I will continue to write about in these posts that I have decided to do as a wholly selfish project to support my understanding of the piece and its themes.

My initial answer would be that in general my homelife is far more harmonious when my partner and I are in empathy with each other. In fact it would be impossible without this act. If he cuts his finger I empathize with the pain and offer him a plaster and a loving word perhaps.

What if we took this approach to humans that we don't know, or humans that come from different lives to us, what if we took this approach to more than human beings? What would the potential of our understanding of the world be?

I wonder if this all sounds very sub age 10. Or is it all quite radical? some of the most radical people I know are sub aged 10.

Anyway, that is the beginning.

More to follow.