Artists Julie Andreyev and Ruth K. Burke introduce us to human-animal creative collaborations that seek to foster kinship relations with other critters and wider ecologies. Their art projects press us to engage with more critical questions of the ethics of these relationships and how one might re-imagine animal labour, in the case of Ruth K. Burke's collaborations, and the nature of interspecies reciprocity, in the works of Julie Andreyev.

​Andreyev’s art projects explore nonhuman agency through co-creation with companion dogs, trees, and currently with local and migratory birds. Her art project titled EPIC_Tom (2014-2020) was conceived and produced with Andreyev’s late dog Tom who provided the animated visuals and vocals for the performance. Her project titled Bird Park Survival Station is a collaboration with local birds, including a crow family whose territory includes her home in Vancouver. The Park, built on the roof of her home, uses methods of creative reciprocity. A computer system records sound and video of the birds and, in return, the Park provides fresh water, food, caching sites, nesting, shelter and perching features. The recordings are analyzed, and information is used to improve the Park’s affordances to assist the birds survive the climate emergency.

​Ruth K. Burke’s art projects include working primarily with her team of young oxen and her horse. Her artworks consider interspecies kinship, multispecies history, and more-than-human collaborations through earthworks, installation, sculpture, sound, and social practice. Her current focus is on interspecies labour and her artworks advocate that interspecies relationships do create legitimate social communities and should be considered as such in socially engaged art. Her work is informed by the lived experience of caring for animals and is nurtured by continued participation in farm work and animal husbandry. Her intention is not to romanticize the past, but to see it as messy and complicated and to imagine a future in which all beings are recognized for their contributions to the co-creation of our world. She is particularly interested in the capacity of art to push conflicting or violent histories up against one another in generative ways.