Dominion, A Whale Symposium [Paperback]

'With an extraordinarily talented entourage of poets, photographers, biologists, composers and cetologists, Philip Hoare and Angela Cockayne have assembled Dominion, a contemporaneous interpretation of man s tortured, often tragic, but sometimes inspired relationship with the great whales. Does this sound a bit like Moby-Dick to you?' --Richard Ellis

'Lots of whale-jack-off photos for the horny and faithful' --John Waters

Angela Cockayne, born Yorkshire now lives and works in Bath, England. She is an artist, curator and Senior Lecturer with Reader in Interdisciplinary Visual Arts at Bath Spa University. Her books include Provenance 2010 and Dominion 2011 both co authored with Philip Hoare. Published by Wunderkammer Press. Her recent project, Provenance, 2010, melds wax sculpture with found natural objects. Her work has recently toured with the House of Fairy Tales Exquisite Trove, an exhibition inspired by cabinets of curiosities or Wunderkammer. Dominion incorporates Cockayne s chimerical objects, part animal, part sculpture, with Philip Hoare s physical interaction with sperm whales. Using artwork and text thrown up by this new meeting of art, literature, music and science, the result is an aesthetic sermon on the state of the whale and the world. The film of the same name has been screened as part of the Dark Monarch exhibition Tate St Ives 2009 and recently Tate Liverpool. Cockayne uses found objects to create provocative assemblies of discarded bottles and gannets' wings, human hair and antique rifles and lobster-clawed women. Beautiful and disturbing, they concern the natural world and the human predicament.' Philip Hoare. Every day nature offers us beautiful objects that we fail to appreciate because we see them only in the too-familiar context of their mundane roles. By taking them out of their usual contexts, Angela Cockayne makes us see them afresh, and in the process, creates an endearing whimsical bestiary all her own. Desmond Morris. Philip Hoare is the author of six works of non-fiction, including biographies of Stephen Tennant and Noel Coward, the historical studies Wilde's Last Stand, Spike Island, and England's Lost Eden.. His latest book, Leviathan or, The Whale, won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. He wrote and presented BBC 2's Arena: The Hunt for Moby-Dick, and directed three films for BBC 4's Whale Night. He is a visiting fellow at Southampton University, and Leverhulme Artist in-residence at The Marine Institute, University of Plymouth, which recently awarded him an honorary doctorate. He lives and works in Southampton.