Fox: Inconvenient bodies and other sense-pectives Sat 6 Sept 11.00am - 6.00pm The Wilderness, Croydon

Following in the hoofsteps of my 2024 project Muntjac which explored connections between ‘invasive’ species and Britishness, my encounters with the fox has inspired another strand research around England’s *obsession* with the right kind of body - who is allowed to stay and who has a say? Who counts and who contaminates?

In England, how nature is taken care of (and who takes care of it) is usually rooted in the perspective of a ‘normative’ body. Knowledge from disabled and other bodies that sense differently are overlooked whilst attitudes to conserving nature often reinforce harmful ableist logics. My encounters with the fox, an animal that is often regarded as an out-of-place, inconvenient, wayward, mangy, scrounger have offered a helpful and oblique lens to think through some of these ideas and understand how the practice of conservation could be enhanced and diversified by bodies that navigate the world differently.

Fox is a pop-up exhibition or tactile essay that attempts to bring some of these insights to life through different methods of creatively ‘texturing’ text via sound, moving image and performative printed matters.

I have developed these provocations with precious input from London National Park City Rangers with lived experience as part of TURF Projects Croydon's beautiful summer programme, At The Meadows Edge.