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Spirit Animal Collective: massive graphite rendering of a 1940s NZ primary school photo, with spirit animals

Cory Doctorow at 10:19 am Fri, Nov 9, 2012

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Souris sez ,"'Spirit Animal Collective' is now available at our shop. The print is based on Kozy's 2009 drawing 'Spirit Animal Collective'. The drawing was the culmination of Kozy's 4 year-long 'Unknown Portraits' project, which involved Kozy's nearly obsessive search through old photographs in junk shops from Australia to Spain to Northern England to San Francisco to our own backyard in Venice Beach (and more!). Most of the drawings were the size of playing cards, but for the final artwork Kozy create a massive graphite rendering of a 1940's-era New Zealand primary school class photo. In it she imagined the camera to reveal the spirit animal within each of the students. This summer we decided to produce a colorized version reminiscent of old tinted photos (Dan's grandmother used to tint photos as a side job while raising her children) and this is the result."

Spirit Animal Collective

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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  • http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith

    Just curious: this configuration is used for school photos from Australia as well. I have one from every class I was in. Do countries other than NZ and Aus have the same tradition?

    • Alpacaman

      Yes! I did this in NZ. Maybe a commonwealth thing? Who knows.

  • AdrenalineSleep

    Whiskey is my spirit animal.

  • http://www.facebook.com/edbeaty Ed Beaty

    I’m new to the world spiritual, and have some questions:

    As animal species go extinct, does the range of spirit animals available to people get smaller?  In a thousand years, will everyone be limited to spirit mice, spirit pigeons, and spirit cows?
    Humans are animals; can people have other people as their spirit animal?  Could non-human animals have schoolchildren as their spirit animals?

    Please let me know, as I’m currently haunted by a spirit nematode and am eager to trade up.