Red Fox Artist Statement
28 June 2024

My lived queer experience is the foundation for this work through which I look for kinship in found families to argue against homophobia and for otherness.

The drawings of the red foxes are done not to depict their queer life as such but to share their day-to-day life. The drawings are done on an old John Burrows travel account (1806) from which maps and plates were torn out and thus devalued. With these drawings I obscure dated colonial text with new queer friendly artworks to normalise queerness, giving it new value.
I brought the book back to the UK where Burrows originated from, but with these additions on its pages. I want to open a discussion about how we can roll science out into the world, but in a friendlier and more diverse and inclusive way than these old colonisers intended centuries ago.

Red foxes (vulpes vulpes) call their clutches of 2 to 6 individuals with staccato rasping clicks called snickering or geckering when in heat. Same sex parenting units is supernormal, so is a single female raising young, which is also found in grizzly bears and warthogs.
Male fertilization is not through bonded pairs but rather ‘sperm donors’. Females adopt orphaned litters. Same sex activity in red foxes and hyenas was only discovered with night photography because they are nocturnal. Sadly these intriguing creatures were also subjected to ‘curing’ homosexual behaviour, similar to how it was administered in homosexual people (Bagemihl, 1999).