Role reversal as Barbara’s animals rule the roost

Barbara Daniels mentions two favourite pieces of artwork in her new book, Dominion Over Man, a collection of 58 pen and ink drawings on watercolour paper.   One is The Anatomy Class, which depicts a frog dissecting a human in a laboratory.   The other, Walk in the Park, which adorns the back cover of the Loughrea artist’s book, shows two dogs walking two humans in a park.

The humans are trying to interact with each other but they’re on leashes and their canine owners are keeping them apart. A sign in the background reads ‘keep humans on a leash’.

“How would it feel if you met someone on the street and the person had a leash and you were being pulled away from the only thing that looks like you,” Barbara says with a chuckle, from her home in Cologne, Germany.

“The art isn’t trying to say you shouldn’t have pets . . . but maybe think about things and what it could be like for the animal on the leash, you know what I mean?”

There are other, more controversial pieces in the series, where the 38-year-old artist shows what the World would be like if the roles of animals and humans were reversed.

Milk Machine shows a line of naked women standing at a milking parlour as a dairy cow hooks up a pump to their breasts to extract milk. A clever role-reversal but not to everyone’s taste.

“That one went viral on Facebook, a lot of negative comment. One woman told me I was being really sexist,” Barbara recalls.

Feedback is mostly positive but the negative stuff had a greater impact on her five years ago, when she first embarked on this series, than now.

“It is controversial, and in the beginning I was a bit self-conscious about doing it because I didn’t know what the neighbours would be saying!”

Dairy Baby Housing pulls at the heart-strings, too. It depicts a cow leaving a (human) baby at a shed in a field full of toddlers in sheds.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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