equirectangular sketch of Alfred Gell's fictional museum of artworks and traps, pencil and digital collage, 2019

This practice-related PhD asks how anthropology can inform art practice, and vice-versa, explored through an ethnography conducted in parallel with four art commissions. The thesis is shaped by my creative collaboration with Nigel — a professional molecatcher whose interest in art and education led to conversations which catalysed my own comparative toggling between art practice and hunting practice, as well as art and anthropological perspectives. Working with Nigel and other pest control hunters in rural North Yorkshire, I investigate the creative mediums and methods they employ to negotiate boundaries in the land and differences in species perspective. I probe the underground reciprocities that form between the repressed perspectives of ‘pest’ animals, land spirits and working-class hunters, tracking them under hedges and fences as they harness and entrap inalienable value from places where none is conventionally perceived.

In the accompanying practice-portfolio I explore four ways of doing this artistically. Moving between written and practice-based work, I chart the tensions between a silenced “Hunting Attitude” and a dominant “Natural Attitude” in England and explore the ways in which this perspectival discrepancy can itself be worked to the hunter/artist’s advantage. I also call upon Metis (a trickster intelligence and goddess of traps) to articulate “reverse creativity”—the particular kind of practical intelligence that is needed not only to set a good trap, but also to escape one.

A “Hunting Attitude” adopted in art proposes situated practice that yields to the perspectives of nonhuman others, engaging the complexity of death-work and drawing attention to purifying boundary-structures that might themselves be probed, entered and inhabited in a life-sustaining way. This in turn suggests methods for negotiating between art and anthropological perspectives, and ways for undermining and re-rooting extractive and anthropocentric frameworks of thought.

This research is based between the UCL Department of Anthropology and the Slade School of Fine Art, co-supervised by Martin Holbraad and David Burrows.  


Link to view /download thesis: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10207642/7/Spriggs_10207642_Thesis.pdf

above: still from performance lecture "Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps. A tour of Gell's Fictional Museum"  

below: "Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps: A view of the Slade School of Art from a Pest Control Perspective". A talk given for the Multimedia Anthropology Lab 2021 conference "Multimedia Encounters"