Battery Cage
In this project, my idea was to explore the idea of body empathy in conjunction with animal abuse done in industrial farming practices. So, I created a human-sized battery cage.
Battery cages are the cages that laying hens are kept in during their short lives. About 4-8 chickens are allowed in each of these cages under U.S. regulatory laws. I used the dimensions of the average American person in comparison with that of the species of hens used in industrial farming, which are Hybrid White Leghorn chickens, to calculate the accurate size of the cage. Within the cage that I created out of steel there is a ramp. The ramp is used to represent the angle of which the battery cages are propped up on to ensure that the eggs roll out of the cage and into the conveyor belt.
A vital part of this artwork is the performance and experience aspect that the viewers will partake in. I want people to physically enter the cage, to put themselves in the shoes of the chickens so to speak. So, during a critique I had people enter and exist within the cage. After I asked what they thought about it, the consensus was that at first they felt quite relaxed and it was almost comforting to be in a confined space, but as time passed a sense of dread and doom began to set in and they could not wait to get out. Luckily these people are not chickens so they do have the choice to leave the battery cage.
