Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident (AIA) 2012
Adelaide Paul was born January 17, 1961 in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. She lived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 1963 to 1969. She spent the remainder of her formative years in South Orange, New Jersey. She graduated from Columbia High School, Maplewood, New Jersey, in 1979. She spent nine years between graduating high school and embarking on a college education teaching horseback riding, shoveling approximately four hundred thousand pounds of horse manure, starting young race horses, managing a stable, waiting tables and bar tending. Her travels include much of the United Kingdom and other bits of Europe, East Africa, Canada, Mexico and all but eight of the United States. Her passions include dogs and other species, the study of anatomy, animal welfare as both an ethical and philosophical concern, Animal behavior, music, movies, gardening, nature as a cultural construct, books on practically any subject, tattooing as an art form and social construct, fashion as a subversive activity and shopping until dropping at flea markets, junk stores and related venues. Adelaide resides in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She shares her home with two cats and six dogs.
In its extremes, American Culture posits an alternately cloyingly sentimental and brutally callous relationship between humans and both domesticated and wild animals. Animals are anthropomorphized in film, fiction and popular culture. They (and their requisite accessories) are hot commodities; like all commodities, they are also disposable.
For the past few years, I have been teaching anatomy to first year veterinary students. On a pragmatic level, rendering a body accurately on the outside is vastly facilitated by understanding the organization of the parts on the inside. What strikes me the most, however, is not how different animals are from humans, but how very similar.
All organisms are dependent upon other species in one way or another; consumption in every sense of the word is integral to life as we know it. I seek to pose questions to the viewer regarding these consumer/consumed/consummated relationships by juxtaposing found and fabricated objects evoking multiple possibilities as to just who is consumed.