Jessie Turner

Honours

Jessie Turner uses fabulation to investigate real and imaginary animals in the bestiary. Positioning the bestiary both as a guide to our complicated relationship with animals and a kind of imaginative wonder towards nature, she recreates the animals and objects that appear within the text. Combining philosophy, medicine, visual art and poetry, the bestiary creates a complex image and understanding of an animal. Beginning with this image, speculative fictions and fabulations including time shifts, alien beings and mirrored futures and pasts become entangled within this work as a future human reflects on a time before the mass extinction event that caused their physical manifestation as light.
Through this investigation, the bestiary is revealed as a shifting text that blurs the boundaries between human, animal and object.