Over the last 50 years, the representation of animals in contemporary art has shifted from traditional schemata into new modes. From Kounellis' Untitled (12 Horses) in 1969 and Beuys' coyote action I Like America and America Likes Me in 1974 to Damien Hirst's preserved animal vitrines and Eduardo Kac's transgenic green-fluorescent rabbit Alba, non-human animals have come to bear new meanings in Western culture.

These strands in fine art run parallel to new thinking about animals. From the Anglosphere, Peter Singer's utilitarianism and Donna Haraway's post-humanism are alive in politics in the shape of animal rights and ethical issues around genetic engineering. From Continental thinking, Jacques Derrida's swansong ruminations on the abyss between animals and humans and Deleuze and Guattari's ‘becoming-animal’ thrive in universities and art schools worldwide. As the global ecology movement has grown, so has awareness of anthropocentrism (a development sometimes decried now as anti-humanist).

Academics, too, have developed a flourishing field in the humanities called animal/human studies, a field that ranges across literature, philosophy and history to sociology, semiotics and geography. The study of animals in each discipline is used as a locus to question and inform theory, stance and argument. This was precisely the aim of The Animal Gaze.

The Animal Gaze was an event developed from practice-led university research in fine art. The intention was academic: to exhibit and examine new ways in which animals appear in contemporary art and the contingent ethics and aesthetics to which such practice may be subject.

The curatorial policy of The Animal Gaze was to avoid representations of animals which regularly appear elsewhere in the visual culture of our own species: ie, no animals as decoration, nor status symbols and vehicles for ancient mythology or totemic ritual. Any objects of affective or pathetic fallacy on display here were unconventional. Much was omitted - general animal portraiture and wildlife studies, anthropomorphs, regular animal/human hybrids and ironies around stuffed toys – questions already asked and answered over the years.

Instead, The Animal Gaze showed stances outside anthropocentrism, deconstructions of species taxonomy, constructions of the idea of difference and documentation of the consequences of indifference. At the same time, these works about animals and humans perhaps confirmed a trend discernible in recent art - an ascendancy of meaning or ambiguity over ineffability and surface, a move away from the gigantic, as well as more evidence of the profile afforded now to artist collaboration and cross-disciplinary research.