Feral Practice
Fiona MacDonald works with human and nonhuman beings as Feral Practice to create art projects and interdisciplinary events that develop ethical and imaginative relations across species boundaries. Often people set up divisions between species and between different categories of knowledge and understanding, Feral Practice collaborates and converses across these barriers.
Our vulnerable, speculative approach brings experimental art into spaces of care and attentiveness for and with real, situated beings. We explore diverse aesthetics and foreground distinctive creaturely subjectivities. Each project is materially and conceptually responsive to its participants, context and audience, often utilising augmenting digital technologies alongside diverse analogue media, participation and voice.
Current and recent projects:
WaterLANDS artist in residence with Laura Harrington 2023-6, exploring the beings, processes and materials of peatlands and their restoration in Northern England.
The Word for Home is Forest 2023-4: a year of outdoor and digital educational activity responding to the ecology and geology of the Quantocks and to the Romantic poets who wrote there and co-creating a short fiction film with year 9 students from Taunton Academy, commissioned by Quantocks Landscape Partnership Scheme.
Wirksworth Festival artist in residence 2023-4, working with recorded conversations, sculpture and painting to propose the wellbeing of human and nonhuman worlds as inextricably enmeshed.
Wysing artist in residence 2024. At Wysing we worked with their sound engineer Lottie Lou Puolet on a two-screen surround-sound installation COMMUNE (comeuntothenest) exploring and expanding human-ant relationship.
Recent projects include: Stream of Consciousness, a 360 VR film experience exploring the River Darent and its habitats. Cocococu, a collaborative, ant-focused residency and exhibition in Porto Alegre, Brasil. Listening Station, a site specific sound art commission for Mangotsfield. The Ant-ic Museum, an exhibition guided by ants, for Scarborough Museum and Art Galleries. Lissener, a site specific audio drama for Estuary Festival 2021. Sum Tyms Bytin Sum Tyms Bit, a film inspired by the novel Riddley Walker, exploring sites of power and fragility in East Kent. The Unseeables, a film commissioned by Scarborough Museums Trust 2020. Ask Somerset’s Plants, radio broadcasts on BBC Somerset and podcasts for Somerset Art Weeks Festival 2019, with Marcus Coates. Phytocentric, a performance at LUX London, 2019. Mycorrhizal Meditation, a participatory sound work, presented as a digital installation at Taipei Biennale, Governors Island, NYC, Bánkitó Fesztivál, Hungary, Radical Mycology Conference USA, Furtherfield Gallery London, and as live performance at The Bluecoat and UNESCO Paris, 2017-19. Plant Hunting, exhibition and events responding to the botanical pursuits of Cook’s Endeavour voyage, commissioned by Invisible Dust for Whitby in 2018. Ask the Wild with Marcus Coates, at Whitechapel Gallery, Tate St Ives, Turner Contemporary, Whitstable Biennale and the Ash Project, and the South London Botanical Institute 2017-18. Foxing, 2017: exhibition and public commission, PEER London. Wood to World, 2015-16: exhibition and events, London and Kent.
