* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Coleen Plumb received an MFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago in 1999. Earlier, she studied visual communications at Northern Illinois University.
Her Animals are Outside Today series explores animals as resources that we consume and mythologize in equal measures. Despite our relationship with animals as symbols, argues Plumb, most people are shielded from them as living creatures that die and decay.
In the words of Henry Beston in a book much admired by Plumb: ‘They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.’
Her work has been exhibited across the United States.