Issue 2: embodied

Artist statement: Returning to themes that were important to me as a young feminist artist in the 1990s, “The ancestors and the familiars” (pencil, ink, and watercolour, 2023) reflects my ongoing interest in depicting human-animal relationships as mutual, embodied, and transformative. In the unhappy world of medical science, animals often suffer. What I learned about my diagnosis and treatment is known largely through experimentation on animals, particularly white rabbits and rats. This piece is thus a self-portrait and a family portrait, but it also represents my ambivalence about the loss of non-human life in the preservation of my own.

Artist bio: Cynthia Imogen Hammond is a visual artist based in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory in Québec, Canada. Her work engages with interspecies relationships in gardens, treescapes, and other landscapes, often with a focus on gender. Facing major surgery in 2023, Cynthia created “Between the Moon and Me”, a series of drawings and paintings that explore moon rites, animal familiars, matrilineal ties, and the changing relationship between her gender and body.

Image description: Three light skin tone women of varying ages gather with their familiar animals–from left to right, a rabbit, cat, and rat, on a starry night. Two of the women stand while the middle woman is seated underneath a red and white chequered blanket; she peels pomegranates.