Melanie Challenger and Rosemary Shirley in conversation with Brigitte Jurack

Melanie Challenger’ How to be Animal explores the remarkable story of what it means to be human and argues that at the heart of our psychology is a profound struggle with being animal. As the most inquisitive, emotional, imaginative, aggressive and baffling animals on the planet, it questions how well we really know ourselves? Drawing on new evidence from a wide range of disciplines, Challenger proposes that being an animal is a process, beautiful and unpredictable, and that we have a chance to tell ourselves a new story, to realise that if we matter, so does everything else. Her first book On Extinction: How we became estranged from nature was published in 2011 (Granta/Counterpoint). It was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the best non-fiction books of 2012, longlisted for the Dolman Travel Book of the Year and received the Santa Barbara Library’s Green Award for environmental writing. https://www.melaniechallenger.com/

Dr Rosemary Shirley’s research centres on cultural representations of rural places and she has published widely on this subject including: Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture (Routledge) and Creating the Countryside: The Rural Idyll Past and Present (Paul Holberton). She is an Associate Professor in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester and also works on curatorial projects, most recently Everywhere: Life in a Littered World an exhibition exploring artistic responses to litter and pollution. She was a research partner in The Rural: Contemporary Art and Spaces of Connection led by Whitechapel Gallery and her writing was included in the Documents in Contemporary Art edition: Rural (Whitechapel/MIT Press). She is currently writing a book about contemporary art and rural places, and a collection of creative and critical essays that takes the Midlands region of the UK as lens through which to explore contemporary rurality. https://le.ac.uk/people/rosemary-shirley

Brigitte Jurack’s current solo exhibition Fieldnotes at HOME includes works in different mediums produced in dialogue with people from different generations, through encounters with ‘the landscape’, and in densely populated cities. She co-founded the artists’ collective Foreign Investment. She studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and is Reader and Head of Sculpture/Time-Based Arts at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, where she is also the International Lead for the Department of Art and Performance. Jurack is based in the Liverpool City Region, having transformed a Victorian Bakery into the Alternator Studio and Project Space. https://www.brigittejurack.de/