Nature has since time immemorial been harnessed as a means of providing a template for constructions of the self in which we reign supreme over the land. In recent decades new materialist and posthuman thinking, specifically a feminist materialism, offer a critique to the social constructivist model that takes our sovereignty as pregiven. Within art, techniques of impersonation and mimesis are used as a platform for activism to support such a reconsideration of our relationship to the environment and the animal. Specifically, artists are using the skin of animals as a means of materially aligning themselves with the non-human and in so doing purposefully rupturing the dichotomy between the human and non. But more than this, the skin of another is used as a means of activating queer, postcolonial and feminist ecologies.

Here the concept of the wild and its association with heteronormative masculinity is thrown open, as the work of Scottish-based artist Hanna Tuulikki points to (Mortimer 2010). This tradition of using animal hides in art, from the work of Joseph Beuys to Nandipha Mntambo, as a form of readdress is well documented. The figure of the animal then has always functioned as other, one that both repulses and also fascinates. In the era of the Anthropocene these tropes are aligned with the climate crisis, such that the sensibility of the animal becomes a means through which the human can be renaturalised. In this paper I explore these presentations of animal skin as a coat for the artist and ask whether contemporary practice is now moving towards a symbiosis through the skin.

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