Elle Barten

“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth’.” [Genesis 1:26]

Dominion (2021) is a multimedia installation composed of three concrete tablets depicting animal exploitation in the style of Paleolithic cave art: one of pigs, one of cows, and one of marine life. Each tablet is a 1m x 40cm wooden panel covered in concrete, painted over to resemble the terracotta of the ancient caves, then illustrated with animal depictions in Paleolithic-style with natural pigments that I used as paint. The base of the concrete to create depth and dimension is chicken wire (for the pig and cow tablets) and litter (for the marine life tablet) that were collected after primary research at St Margaret’s Bay in Ramsgate, bringing the relationship between farming and environmentalism directly into my work as a medium. My interest in reinterpreting the cave art comes from the juxtaposition of the portrayal of animals in Paleolithic art to now – from a living creature in their own right, admired and feared and awe-inspiring to the cave painters, to a modern commodity we exploit and slaughter on mass.

The core of my work is the illusion of cave art with a modern theme. Upon first glance, the terracotta concrete with the texture and indents, the simplistic animal figures, and the use of natural pigments blended with fingertips could pass for an imitation. Yet on closer inspection, the illusion fades. Artists who interest me and have influenced this work the most include Sue Coe, Charlie Numbulmoore, and the Chapman Brothers. Coe’s passionate animal activism and graphic imagery to raise political questions about the exploitation of animals has been the primary influence for my work. Numbulmoore’s beautifully effective recreations of ancient aboriginal art and use of natural pigments to paint made the most effective cave art recreations I have seen. The Chapman Brothers’ evocative pieces from The Chapman Brothers Family Collection (2002) of faux-ethnographic sculptures to highlight the role of global capitalism in cultural imperialism was a defining inspiration for creating some of the illusion and imagery with my work.