Feral Fires and Re-imagining Creative Selves

Abstract

Aesthetics focus on how we navigate meaning through qualities of art and sensory experience. Therefore, a feral aesthetic implies the practice of artistic representation from “untamed” spaces--in other words, feral spaces that can be represented through aesthetic ways of being and knowing. The artwork shared in this essay exemplifies how feral aesthetics might work as a living palimpsest archeology of memory. The arts-informed essay considers what ferality can tell us about past and future. Art (as a practice of aesthetic inquiry) becomes a site of excavation into questions of the social future and how we might imagine aesthetic sites for transformation. The author explores how art and aesthetic inquiry might inform or transform our engagement with each other and the nonhuman world.