In 2003 I was on a residency in Gremany and started to collect documentation of Hunting Boxes I found in the woods around Wiepersdorf. I collected video, digital images and analogue slide transparencies. In 2005 I had the idea for The Hunting Box Party, which has been exhibited as part of 'Change Hunters Hide' Emmanuel Walderdorff Gallery Molsberg, Germany, 2021; 'Magaslesek' (Hochsitze – Raised Hides) Knoll Gallery, Budapest, Hungary, 2011; 'Buffer Zone' The Armoury Gallery, Sydney Olympic Park, Australia, 2011; 'Hochsitze' (Raised Hides) Knoll Gallery, Vienna, Austria, 2010; 'C2' Crawford Art Gallery, Cork 2005 & 'ArtTrail' Cork, 2003.
The Hunting Box Party consists of a political party for hunting boxes; the hunting boxes are the members and the candidates of the party. Working strategies include photography, display cases, greeting cards, badges, murals and videos. In this work, I was interested in how our relationship with nature is a construct of identification with historic cultural traditions, such as painting, and how these traditions have created the idea of nature as a landscape. The distancing these ‘Hunting Boxes’ represent reduces nature to an object of desire to be viewed from a distance, expressed through issues of observation and hunting, hunting in this case, for something unobtainable, a connection with nature.
This work was made possible through a residency at Kunstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf, Germany, with the Stiftung Kulturfonds, 2003 and an Arts Council of Ireland residency award, 2002
Also see videos Hunting Boxes 2003