Stoat (2018)

Video animation by Oliver Clifton, X-ray Vision, of scanned pages of Stoat

Stoat in progress during a pop-up residency and exhibition, Estonian Printing & Paper Museum, Tartu, 2018.

The vintage book cover and collage material were sourced during an artist residency at the Estonian Printing and Paper Museum, Tartu, in 2017. The book cover had already been emptied of its contents, so I imagined new contents based simply on the cover imagery. (Kärp means Stoat in Estonian). I was struck by the visual correspondences between the hills on the cover illustration and the curving back of a mink illustration in a redundant Estonian natural history book, and conceived a narrative in which the stoat was both the subject and the context of the book. The resulting imagery comprises a landscape formed by stoats and similar animals, inhabited by progressively smaller stoats and similar animals.