Prove It: Shan Crosbie

In 2014, news stations all over the world followed the plight of the pig that risked her life by jumping out of a truck bound for the slaughterhouse. She was rewarded for her desire for life by being adopted by the Guangxi police station in the usual place of the station’s police dog.

Prove it explores the phenomenon of escaped livestock being saved from the slaughterhouse by the media. Playing on the relationship between print and painting, copy and original, this mass installation of works aims to shed light on our selective empathy towards animals that have ‘proved’ their will to live.

Artist Shan Crosbie aims to create a welcoming and entertaining environment to reflect and discuss such stories and the way in which people have responded to them.

She is interested in the psychology of why people suddenly feel empathetically connected to an animal only once it has actively shown an interest in surviving. She asks: why it limited to the individual and not extended to the pigs at the bottom of the truck or on their dinner plates?

“My interest in the lives of animals arose when I began to learn more about the reality behind what I was putting in my stomach. My work aims to question in a creative and non-threatening way the industrialised practice of farming, slaughtering and consuming animals and their products.

“I want to question the social conditioning surrounding meat consumption. I wonder how people reconcile their love for animals against valuing an animal’s life as the price of a packet of bacon,” she states.