Ed Puddington

Ed Puddington (b. 2002) is a visual artist working primarily across photography and video. His work explores dualities of change and permanence, subject and viewer, and ties between human animals and nonhuman animals – particularly relating to birds. Originally studying biology, Puddington started making art following sudden long-term illness. This shift in subject matter following prolonged isolation is visible in multiple works engaging in a want for contact with the nonhuman animal. Frequently using his body to represent birds, Puddington attempts to connect with nonhuman animals whilst also pointing to their absence from the frame, and so perhaps our lives.

Engaging with the practice of self-portraiture, Puddington uses his body as a stand-in for the bird, attempting to, as scholar Donna Haraway terms, “make kin” with the nonhuman animal, whilst also pointing to their absence from the frame, and so perhaps our lives.  In the artist's most recent series, these bodily stagings centred on sites of raptor persecution. For Puddington, photographic intervention is a way to consciously mourn these crimes of interspecies loss, whilst calling attention to their ongoing occurrence.