The Hunting Box Party was initiated in 2003 with a photographic and video documentation project of Hunting Boxes found in the woods of Wiepersdorf in Germany. In 2005 the idea for The Hunting Box Party was created and 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 fake 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