Cut-out Bambi

A6 landscape format bookwork, limited edition of up to 20 (made on demand). Five folded leaves (20 uncut pages), printed with poem text and video stills with deer excised; bound into silver mirror film-covered cartridge paper with inkjet-printed deer silhouette; linen thread stab-binding; inside covers with black-and-white close-up detail of deer hide.

Cut-out Bambi brings together two manifestations of cuteness: a “translation” of scenes from the Disney film Bambi, constructed from notes I took while watching the film for the first time, and screen shots from YouTube videos of deer and fawns in urban or suburban locations. I am interested in exploring the collision between “cute” images of deer in mass media and the erasure of deer by humans, not only through hunting, but also planned, conservation-driven culling and random “drive-by” killing by vehicles. It may sound strange, but when I was cutting out the deer from the printed images with a scalpel, it did feel like an act of violence. (Interestingly, readers have “awwwed” over the cut-out shapes as they might over an actual deer image – in particular with the fawn in the bathtub.) Cut-out Bambi also engages with ideas about anthropocentrism and Donna Haraway’s concept of the “animal mirror”, and how it might be possible to decentre, disrupt and destabilise the human gaze and its reflection.