Meat has featured throughout art history ranging from their presence in impressionist art, such as Still Life with Meat by Claude Monet, to contemporary photography, such as House Beautiful by Sian Bonnell.  I started my project focusing on the different implications of eating meat; the environmental impact, ethical issues and religious. 

 

Through this project, the role of the viewer is to inform themselves of what is justifiable and unjustifiable with questions such as ‘Is the killing of animals justifiable for human indulgence?’. It is the role of the artist to present their opinion through their work to encourage reflection and discussion. 

 

In my work, I am attempting to visit  an abattoir in order to confront the slaughtering and death of the animals in which we eat. It is this liminal stage between life and death that I wanted to explore in the abattoir. The moment before the animal is slaughtered, when it has lost its previous identity of a farm yard animal. 

 

In an attempt to confront the slaughtering, I have been in contact with over fifteen abattoirs, which have all been followed up with various excuses for rejection; from the possible negative media, to hygiene, to the lack of time to show a person around. I was granted access to an agricultural auction house, Lanark Market, to see the butchers bid on the 3000 animals which would be slaughtered in the hour and sold at the butchers. I went there to take photos of the holding pens, the auction and the physical process of splitting up the animals into biddable groups.  The photos have a documentational purpose to show the liminality of the auction and to raise ethical questions surrounding the scale human indulgence. The animals were in the boundary between the act of raising and nurturing to the eventuality of buying and killing. Some photographs are composed to pay subtle homage to Renaissance paintings. These images have had a variety or reactions with the most extreme comparing the scale and order to the Nazi camps during The Holocaust.