In the past years it started to occur to me that there is something key in our relationships with dogs. We are drawn to be with them; how we are with them is unlike other relationships. A dog is always here. It pulls us into this bodily, intuitive and a more primal social space. 
 
A surprising outcome of drawing dogs was their anatomical similarity to humans. A heart, an eye, taking scale out of the equation, would be hard to distinguish from its human equivalents. Other body parts, even if seemingly different, revealed underlying common logic - the skeletal structure of a paw was so much like a human palm - with fingers and a thumb; the shape of a nose - folds of skin required those same gestures in drawings, those same curves and directions. In a way drawing dogs versus humans was like writing the same letter of the alphabet, just using a different font. I started to feel our siblinghood. 
 
A part of this story is that I have never had a pet dog, I was always a plant person. This interest and opening myself up to dogs came indirectly, through research into trauma on one hand and into digital tech on the other. Behavioural psychology weaved into those themes came with stories of, sometimes disturbing, animal experiments. 
 
In the course of working on the exhibition I have made huge leaps in working on my own digital addiction: I stopped binge watching tv series, which required me to stop watching videos all together, I quit social media, messaging and shopping apps. Over that time my vision began to behave differently.  The surrounding world became concrete and sensual, as opposed to being rationally visual, built out of information. The quality of that change is hard to describe. In some ways it is a return to the way I have been seeing when I was younger. And so somehow it feels to me that for a good chunk of my adult life I was not here.

Looking in the direction of a dog I can see in the distance: caves, ocean. This is the direction I want to take. 
 
The first dog drawing I made became a basis for the work ‘Lifetime’. It is broadly inspired by behavioural psychology, conditioning and dog experiments sometimes used in the development of digital tech and commerce. It is a puzzling scene, involving two dogs with unequal plates of sausages. A mix of jeleousy, a sense of unfairness, pain, confusion about the logic of economical wealth, confusion about the logic of reward. It appeared to me at some point: we often look towards those who have more. 
 
Even this drama, I want to leave - follow the dog, to the cave, to the sea.