Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca
No. 121 - winter 2019

Fevered Sleep’s Sheep Pig Goat


Last year, Sheep Pig Goat, the UK-based company Fevered Sleep’ project, was commissioned by the Wellcome Collection as part of their year-long Making Nature program, which explored the relationship between perception and knowledge in human-animal relationships, along with all the attendant issues of mastery, anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism that the human production of knowledge about animals inevitably raises. The company describes this as a ‘creative research studio:’ Sheep Pig Goat involved a weeklong public presentation of ‘a series of improvised encounters between human performers and animal spectators:’ specifically, some sheep, pigs and goats. Originally, the idea was to make a performance for an animal audience staged in the galleries at the Wellcome. But gradually the company moved away from this towards plans for a project that would offer human visitors what director, David Harradine describes as a space in which to “properly, respectfully and carefully observe animals watching a performance and reflect and report back on what they’ve seen, whether it’s the body language of a pig or a goat.”1 For Harradine, “humans do a really bad job of paying attention,’ and so the project was conceived of as giving both the company and a wider public the opportunity to attend to animals, but also to attend to animals as they themselves engaged in processes of attending, rather than being mere objects of human observation.”2

In 1996, Harradine and co-artistic director, Sam Butler founded Fevered Sleep, and have created over 20 different projects of which Sheep Pig Goat is not the


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Fevered Sleep, Sheep Pig Goat, 2017. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection.
Fevered Sleep, Sheep Pig Goat, 2017. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection.
Fevered Sleep, Sheep Pig Goat, 2017. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection.
Fevered Sleep, Sheep Pig Goat, 2017. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection.