The Living World of Animals
About The Project: Virtual Exhibition + Artist’s Interview
There are animals we know by name, animals we recognise from a photograph, and animals we may only ever see for a few seconds: a bird on a wire, a cat watching from a window, a horse in a field, something moving through the trees before disappearing again.
These encounters can be ordinary, but they are rarely meaningless.
The Living World of Animals is a virtual exhibition by Open Call For Artists, bringing together artists who explore animals through observation, memory, imagination, symbolism, and personal experience. The exhibition is open to many interpretations of the theme, allowing artists to consider everything from wildlife and habitats to domestic animals and the relationships we form with them.
Some of the works begin with close observation. Others use animals to speak about something beyond the animal itself: companionship, freedom, vulnerability, instinct, loss, belonging, or the ways different cultures understand the creatures around them.
This makes for a collection that moves between the familiar and the unexpected. A recognisable animal may appear in a completely imagined setting. A domestic scene may become a reflection on attachment. A study of wildlife may draw attention to a habitat we rarely think about until it is threatened.
The artists also work across different mediums and approaches, from painting and photography to digital art, collage, sculpture, textiles, and mixed media. What connects them is not a particular style, but an interest in looking more closely at the animals that share our world.
The exhibition offers no single way of understanding that relationship. Instead, it gives us a range of perspectives and lets each work make its own case.
Exhibition Note
The Living World of Animals: A Virtual Exhibition
We tend to think we know animals.
We know which ones we are comfortable around, which ones make us curious, which ones frighten us, and which ones we have grown attached to. We also carry ideas about animals that come from childhood stories, films, family traditions, photographs, and the places where we have lived.
Art can complicate those ideas.
In The Living World of Animals, an animal might be the subject of a work, but it can also be a memory, a symbol, a companion, or simply a creature worth looking at carefully. The difference matters. A portrait of a beloved pet carries a different kind of attention from an image of an animal encountered in the wild. An imagined creature asks something else of us altogether.
The artists selected through the Open Call For Artists approach these possibilities in their own ways. Some stay close to what they have seen; others reshape the animal world through colour, abstraction, symbolism, or imagination.
There is also something interesting about seeing these works together. Animals that we usually separate in our minds, domestic and wild, familiar and unfamiliar, begin to share the same visual conversation. So do very different ideas about what animals mean to us.
Perhaps the most rewarding part is simply noticing how much can be said through a creature that cannot speak for itself.
A movement, a posture, a pair of eyes, a familiar face. Sometimes that is enough to make us look twice.
